Win The Inside Game: High Performance Psychology, Busting Fitness Myths, & Getting Unstuck With Elite Coach Steve Magness | The Rich Roll Podcast

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We are connected and compared to basically anybody in the world.

In we haven't grappled with this environment that we're in that tells us the world is dangerous, we don't belong.

Everyone is out to get us.

And what's the end result?

we adopt that threat state.

Most of us live in what is essentially survival mode, chasing external validation while also battling between who we are and who we think we should be.

Well, Steve Magnus believes there's a better way.

The former elite track and field coach to Olympians turned best selling author and high performance authority, Steve has dedicated his career to understanding the nuances of high performance, which he furthers in his latest book, Win the Inside Game, in which he reveals why our pursuit of success often leads to self -sabotage and how to transform this pattern into sustainable growth.

So much of, whether we're talking about sport, performance, or creativity, is figuring out these almost mental games to convince our brain your life isn't over.

It's being able to say, okay, I'm gonna strive for this, but I'm still gonna have a little bit of space between this goal and my sense of self.

And I think that's where the magic occurs.

Steve shows us how to embrace the journey from constant striving to lasting fulfillment.

So today we explore what it takes to get unstuck, how to care deeply while letting go, and why winning the inner game is pretty much the key to basically everything.

The reality is none of us are that good until we try something for a long enough period of time.

We're not allowed to not be good.

Right. And I think when we have societally something that shifts and pushes us from stop exploring, then we're going to end up in bad places, whether it's adults or kids.

So what's the solution, Steve?

Like how do we emerge out of it?

I think step one is...

Steve, great to have you back here.

Thanks for having me.

Good to see you. We do lots of stuff to talk about.

We were just chatting before the podcast about how we all sort of study the things we most need to learn ourselves.

And I think in many ways, going back to kind of what we talked about last time, your experience at the Nike Oregon project and your own kind of athletic ambitions slightly unrealized creates this curiosity and this desire to like understand and like what held you back and how you can kind of pay forward what you learned to help other people kind of avoid the things that you had to contend with as a young person.

That is the essence of my writing career.

And you're still doing it.

How many books have you written at this point?

Oh gosh, five. Five, yeah.

But like expanding the aperture, right?

Starting very, you know, kind of specifically on, you know, the art and science of running and now kind of like blowing it wide into kind of principles that are applicable to everybody.

I mean I think that's how I've evolved as a person because I was very narrow.

My first book Science of Running, no idea what I was doing.

Just said, I want to write like the be all, end all on the physiology of training.

So it was like nerd out, right?

And that's all I cared about at that time.

But as you can see in my great career, So here, like I've kind of expanded because the questions have expanded at that time in my early twenties, like what mattered to me?

How dare you get outside your lane coming from like the origin of that metaphor, right?

Like a sport in which it's literally about being in your lane.

You know, but I think that's like the human experience.

If all I stuck to was running in the physiology and the training of it, A, I would go mind numbingly boring after that.

Yeah, like I don't know how people kind of do that.

Like they're so into one thing and they stay there.

Yeah. I would get bored.

It blows my mind. I'm, you know, I was talking to a good friend and author who's got a book coming out on this.

Alex Hutchinson? Sure.

I'm trying to get him on. We're working on scheduling right now.

He was a very early guest on the show.

Yeah. When his book Endur came out, which I still think is like, you know, So that sets the bar for everybody else.

It is. I gotta tell you, his new one is on why we have this need to explore.

And when reading it and discussing with him, that is the basis of, I think my entire career as well, is I can't, you can explore deep, right?

You can go nerd out on the science of running and like go deeper and deeper, but at some point the gain becomes smaller smaller and smaller and smaller, right?

And the returns more and more diminishing.

Exactly, it's why at certain period in my career, like I actually started a PhD in exercise physiology.

I did that for about a year and a half and said, holy crap, I'm gonna go nuts because it was just going deeper and deeper and deeper on a narrow end subject.

And I was losing the part that I loved which was the applicability to people.

how do we get people to improve both and running and then outside of that?

And I was losing that.

So I just called it quits on there because I realized at that point my skill set and my, we'll call it a gift, is being able to explore things deeply enough to understand them at a decently high technical level and then capture those nuggets and say, here's what actually matters.

And I realized that if I narrow myself to this aperture of running, I'm not fulfilling my potential and I'm not satisfying that need to explore that I want.

So, I could stay in my lane, but I don't think the the value comes from that.

I think the value comes from taking what your knowledge base and expertise is and it is, and then going a lane over and then a lane over and a lain over and making sure you go deep enough to understand it.

But keep that exploration going.

And then how to synthesize all of those ideas across a variety of disciplines and in turn translate them in a decipherable and applicable or practical way for other people.

That's the name of the game because nowadays, especially with AI, we can get answers to any sort of question we want, any sort of deep answers to a question we want.

but what matters, and this is coaching 101.

What matters isn't that you can recite the Krebs cycle.

It's can you take that knowledge and apply it to an athlete, sitting in front of you and help them physiologically or psychologically improve at the thing that they're trying to get at?

And whether that's running coaching or helping people at life, it's the same.

It's applicability, it's the translation that really matters.

Yeah, God bless people who get super hyper focused on one thing and it excites them for a lifetime.

Yeah, I think you and I share that you know, a sensibility that feels like an impossibility.

But I think there's something within that idea that applies to your most recent last two books, and as well as to, you know, something I've been spending a lot of time thinking about, which is these pursuits, let's just use running as an example, somebody who has a kind of transformative experience.

They weren't a runner, they become a runner, they complete their first marathon, or they have, you know, they basically go on this journey, right?

And there's a life transformation that takes place within that, that elevates their sense of possibility and their own kind of relationship with their potential that spills out into other areas of life.

and yet because it was such a special kind of experience for them and there's a community piece obviously as well, they become part of this community, what liberates them often also keeps them stuck and their curiosity or their kind of reflex around exploration starts to become limited and they stay in that world rather than take everything they learned as a result of that experience and then translate it or apply it in other areas of life.

I'm always curious around why that is or our own kind of human facility for whether you call it denial or some version of that, right?

Like you have this experience getting out of your comfort zone, but then your comfort zone, that becomes your comfort zone, right?

But you're sort of like lauded for what you've done within that world and yet it becomes this trap.

The things that are superpowers are often the things that get in the way because we're comfortable there, we feel competent there, and it's easy to continually go back to that place.

The simplest thing in the world for me would be to talk training 24 -7.

I could do it all day with no prep, right?

But there's no growth there.

There's no getting out of that comfort zone and saying, okay, how do I apply these ideas elsewhere?

And I think the reason that it occurs is if you look at the psychology is that essentially it provides this degree of safety.

And as we age, what research tells us is that we explore less and less and less because everything around us kind of cements to degree.

Right, we found our breakthrough through running or exercise or reading or writing or whatever it is.

And we said, great, this is the answer.

But we forget, as you said that lesson, that the only reason we found this thing is because we left something comfortable in the first place.

Right, but we become calcified A as a function of aging.

And secondarily just because it's, you know, we delude ourselves into thinking like, oh, we're still exploring the edges of our comfort zone while remaining within it all along.

Yeah. I mean, the best antidote to this is have a young kid.

Because when you're on the precipice of, you know, doubling down on, right.

You're about to have your second kid Exactly.

But like our one and a half year old, you watch her and she's in constant exploration mode all the time.

Why? Because she doesn't know how the world works.

And once she figures out how something works, like how a toy works, she'll go do it over and over and over again and it will satisfy her a little bit and then she'll go explore something else.

We have this central tension and psychology calls it explore versus exploit, which essentially means like we have to explore to understand how the world works and how everything functions and gain some expertise.

But then we have to utilize that expertise.

But if we stick on that exploit or utilizing that expertise too long, we get stuck in what I just call the rut of competence.

Meaning, we're really good at this thing.

Our brain knows what's going to happen, right?

We can predict if I go on this run, this is how I'm going to feel.

If I write this book, this is how I'm going to experience it.

And there's security and safety in that.

And I think it's not just aging.

It's also we don't like to deal with uncertainty and I would double down on in a world that is chaotic, uncertain, feels like we might not belong or like find our path, because it's the social media of everything.

Then that just pushes us more and more to narrow.

So the more uncertain the world becomes and we're certainly in a very uncertain moment, the more likely we are to kind of clutch to those things that make us feel safe.

And that comes at the cost of that instinct to explore and be curious.

Yeah, there's like five or six different psychological theories that all say the same thing.

What is the difference in your experience, but also based upon all the kind of science and psychology that you're steeped in between the person who has the awareness to like notice that within themselves and step outside of it.

And the person who does kind of remain within the protective enclave of those patterns and ruts.

So a couple of different things is, one is the person who can step outside generally has things in their life that bring perspective.

Meaning they either travel to new places or experience new things regularly.

It's just a part of their life.

They have a diverse array of people in their lives that challenge them in different ways.

So it's not just like, you know, here's my small social circle, I'm gonna keep that for the next 20 years of my life, right?

And then the second part of it is it requires some sense of security.

So again, I'm gonna go back to the toddler example, it's on my mind, sorry, you're gonna get lots of examples here.

But my daughter will explore more so if she knows she's in a secure environment, Meaning if like me or my wife or you know someone she knows is relatively near she'll go run off at the park and just be gone you know and explore.

If because that sense of security is already taken care of.

Bingo, you know mom or dad or someone you someone there is gonna step in and save you if you got in real trouble.

If that's not the case if we dropped her off with like a new babysitter.

She doesn't have that security.

She's not wandering off, right.

She's staying close to things that she knows and like identifies with, even in the environment and the same is true for adults.

So if we don't have that sense of security and kind of who we are, or our environments or where we belong, then we're not going to be able to explore because we kind of get trapped in that kind of safety mode, where it's just it's like we're the toddler, we're saying no, I'm not gonna leave this couch or mom or dad because this is the only place I feel safe.

It's interesting when you reflect upon our own relationship with our sense of security in the world, like yes, there are things right now that do kind of in fact make us feel perhaps a little bit more uncertain than we have in years past, but at the same time, the world has always been an uncertain place, what is the relationship with our devices and the media landscape doing with respect to that relationship with security that is compelling us to withdraw a little bit more than we otherwise would because the incentive structure of media is to kind of feed us with stories that make us afraid and tell

us that the world is very unsafe and uncertain.

The way I like to explain this is our brain is predictive.

so I'll use another toddler example is a couple months ago there was this trend on the internet where you essentially take your your baby or toddler you go up near a wall you hit your hand on the wall to make a loud noise and then you clutch the baby's head and the baby will scream as if they hit their head and what's happening there is a great example of how the brain works is it takes our priors so our experience our expectations and then what's What's the feedback going on now, so the experience?

And it says, hey, I'm going to judge based on these two things.

In the toddler example, the feedback is saying, hey, you didn't hit your head, there's no pain.

But the rest of it, for me or whoever's holding there, you hear the noise, you see mom or dad clutch your head, so the baby screams, right, that's how our brain works.

It's predictive. Now think of it as adults in an information environment.

If we're constantly inundated with things that tell us that the world is dangerous, threats and fear are at our neighborhood.

You know, on coming through our social media app and all that stuff.

Then our predictive brain says, Okay, what am I going to trust?

What I see in front of me, which is like, not that dangerous.

No one's trying to get me or what all this information tells me, you're going to be like toddler who trusts that hey I hit the wall and there's been decades of research on this going back to uh the 1970s and 80s this pioneer called George Gerbner coined mean world syndrome and he essentially found that the more people watched local news in the 70s and 80s when it was like the beginning of if it bleeds it leads the more anxiety they had and then the more they felt like and report that their neighborhood wasn't safe.

And it's only gotten worse since then.

There was, again, years ago when the Boston Marathon bombing occurred, they were in this fascinating study where they looked at people who were there on that day in Boston, who essentially witnessed the bombing or were very nearby, and they compared their stress levels for the next days and weeks compared to people who just watched news or went on read it or went on social media.

And what they found is that those who consumed more than six hours a day of either social media, Reddit, TV, they had higher stress levels than people who were actually there that day.

Wow. And the point is we haven't grappled with this environment that we're in that tells us the world is dangerous, we don't belong, everyone is out to get us, and we just weren't meant to kind of grow up in this place.

I could go on for this, in days, but we essentially evolved to handle a couple dozen tribe mates and figure out our place in the world within that.

And instead we got thrown into this world where we are connected and compared, which is the biggest thing, compared to basically anybody in the world.

So of course, we're gonna feel like the world is threatening, we're insignificant, There's no place to be in.

What's the end result?

We shut down. We get anxious.

We adopt that threat state.

The brain is as predictive as it is addicted, right?

You have this example in the book of the nail in the boot, the guy with the nail in the boot who thinks that he's been injured and they only, they discover the nail went in between his toes, which is that kind of captures the whole thing, right?

Yeah, it's true. But the difference with respect to our media landscape is the addictive nature in which it's fed to us and our kind of brain's inability to see it for what it is and take a step back from it.

Exactly, we can, in that example, you can take off the boot, you see the nail isn't in your foot and you're okay, right?

Your brain goes okay, I'm gonna update.

Like I'm not in pain.

In the media example, the addiction is there.

And the incentive is all aligned to push us towards like shallower and shallower and shallower content that gets the fear, outrage, anxiety driven.

It's there for a reason.

Uh -huh. Like stress isn't bad.

The anxiety isn't bad, but it's there for a specific short -term point to alert us and then have us do something about it.

One of the things that I respect about you is your willingness to kind of mix it up on social media.

There's a lot of discourse around training philosophies and what is in Vogue at the moment and the kind of terms that people love to kind of throw around.

And most of the people who are throwing them around are not necessarily fully qualified to speak to them.

And you're willing to kind of like go in there and be this tuning fork to separate kind of fact from fiction, which is something I really don't do but had a sort of mild experience with recently.

Like usually like to your point about like how we kind of withdraw, you know, because it feels threatening.

I don't have that practice that you have. But the other day I put up this podcast with Christian Blymenfelt, and I don't know what came over me but I kind of like wrote this thing.

I'm like, listen, you know, this guy, according to what I've read has the highest VO2 Max ever recorded in history.

And in a world in which, you know, there's a lot of people talking about, you know, fitness trends, et cetera, we've lost sight of, you know, who are the experts and who aren't.

And there's a distrust in media, but, you know, experts are important and they're out there in the world.

and they deserve our attention.

We should curate our feed to make sure that we're focusing our attention on the people who actually deserve it.

And I copied, what did I do?

I tagged you in it, right?

And so I was like, because this felt like a sort of Steve Magnus kind of thing and I wanted to make sure that you saw it.

And predictably, it resulted in all kinds of insanity.

And I was like, okay, this is exactly why I don't do this.

like I'm not doing this again.

If this is not worth it and like was this productive?

I don't really think so.

And so, you know, my brain goes, yeah, take a step back and like maybe not engaged in this way but your relationship with it is a little bit different.

Like you moved towards it.

I wish for my own mental health that I did what you did because it can be both addicting and, you know, lead you down a bad path if you do it over and over again.

I think with me, what I try and do is have some guardrails and say, I'm gonna pick my spots because it's important that we have people with actual expertise like correct and put things out there.

Because if we didn't, who wins?

We get nonsense all the time.

So, I have this like inner battle of myself, I'm like, okay do I really wanna go through this and put this out on social media because what's gonna happen is exactly what happened to you.

Is you're gonna get all this nonsense and all these random people telling you that you're wrong on these things that are fundamental proofs to your sport or your understanding or science or something, and it can be maddening.

But we have to have people who fight the good fight, because if we don't, we're just gonna get swarmed with a bunch of nonsense and people who don't know any better, who don't have the expertise are just going to go with what's loudest. But there is a countervailing incentive which is when you do that, it does gather attention.

I can't remember, where was I?

Somewhere, and I was talking to somebody who's like not part of the running world.

And they were like, do you know Steve Magnus?

I love all the stuff that he shares.

And so, there is a value in it.

I guess it's really about your relationship with that feedback, which goes to this issue of attachment, which is really at the core of, it's kind of like at the core of your thesis of the new book, like what gets in the way of the goals that you aspire to accomplish or the trajectory that you wanna be on very much has to do with your attachment to things that are at cross purposes with it.

That is, you know, in Eastern philosophy at the root of all suffering, of course, and has all of these roots in what I think we're only beginning to understand about like the psychology of high performance.

Absolutely, and as I said, with the social media, I think this is the problem.

It incentivizes attachment.

Cause if I wanted, if I wanted if my goal in social media was growth, right, or notoriety, I would just tweet out or send out into the world like fact checks on controversial things I would talk about cold plunges every day all day, right?

I would talk about you know zone two in high intensity interval training in the most controversial way But if I do that What happens to me is I essentially like Clingon attached to these things.

It's no different than If I was a diet influencer, and I called myself, the carnivore diet guy, and that was my name, my label, everything, then if some study came out and said, hey the carnivore diet might be good for some people, but not the best for all.

I think those studies might exist. They probably do, I'm almost certain that they do.

I can't change because my identity is entirely intertwined with that.

Because my social media identity and background is entirely intertwined with that.

I think when we look at attachment, it's yes, we need to care deeply about things.

We need to be passionate about things, but we have to be very careful about what we're married to.

Because if I tie my entire identity around, in my case, correcting people on endurance training stuff, and XYZ, well if all of a sudden, research changes and says that this is great, or some world -class athletes start experimenting with this and show it has a potential, I've gotta be able to change and adapt.

And if I'm too attached, I'm not going to.

Yeah, hold your attachments loosely.

And it goes to another kind of core aspect of the book and kind of everything that you share, which is things are complicated and there is nuance lingering everywhere.

And to kind of hold yourself out as someone who says otherwise, is not only a disservice to whoever you're talking to.

It's a disservice to yourself and your ability to grow and evolve.

And the problem sort of is rooted in this evolutionary kind of impulse or demand that we have, which is to be a member of a group, right?

Like that is our core thing.

Like we want to be part of a community.

And the problem arises when that becomes a really calcified attachment that then any idea that is at cross purposes with that kind of is taken as like an attack or an assault that you have to defend against. When you're in protecting defend mode, you essentially shut down listening and learning.

And what all sorts of research tells us is that the easiest way to get in protect and defend mode is attach yourself to some sort of group identity and there's some fascinating work that essentially shows that well we think that we choose our groups based on like our ethics and morals and values and all that stuff.

It actually kind of works opposite way is once we're in a group our values ethics morals shift wherever that group goes to a large degree.

And that's why it's really important to A choose your groups wisely, and then B, have some sort of like decentering or like not clinging attachment to that group where it's like, again, there's certain people you're married to right?

Your wife, your family, they're part of it, but everything else we get to choose.

And I think that is the the key is that for whatever reason in modern society, because of some of the things that we've talked about living in this kind of threat survival mode, is we tend to cling to those groups and attach because like they fill a void.

And when we do that, we stop listening, learning.

Yeah, there's group identity and then there's our own identity.

And I think when you mistake those with each other and your relationship with your own identity is so kind of intrinsic or tied to in an unhealthy way, the identity of a group, that any kind of threat to the group is a threat on your own identity.

And again, this goes to like nuance, right?

Like an intrinsic versus extrinsic motivations.

Like we wanna be intrinsically motivated, which means we need to have this connection and relationship with ourselves where we understand what our own identity is and what's important to us.

But when we hold on to our identity too tightly, those extrinsic kind of ideas or impulses are then kind of taken as a threat to that.

There's ideas or opinions, but when those are too closely aligned with like who you think you are and how you hold yourself out to the world, then it becomes problematic.

It's one of the central problems of our current world, because think about it, whether we look at, I'm not gonna go there, but politics, whether we look at diet, even fitness, health, there are certain topics that if you brought them up to certain people, to a large amount of people, what happens?

We go straight into that protective end mode, because there's that identity intertwine, where it's like, you can't even mention it.

it's so, I mean, it used to be like sort of growing up, you know, as a gen Xer it's like, okay, you know, politics and religion, those are the third rail.

Like, you know, everybody has their opinions, kind of made me steer clear of that.

But now it's everything.

It's guys fit. Everything is now kind of a political football in which identity is intertwined with, you know, whatever your philosophy is in a way that makes everybody, like it's creating the anxiety, but it's creating the defensiveness and all the aggression and everything.

And this is the experiment that we're running on social media as it continues to kind of become atomized and there's more and more subgroups.

Like that's only gonna like proliferate as far as I can tell.

Yeah you're spot on, we've made everything politics.

And the result is like politics used to be.

Until every single person is their own little political.

Right, but that's the thing.

Our desire to be part of a community Then leaves us like completely alone on our own, like, you know, deserted island.

Bingo. Because it's, everyone is either with us, or against us.

We've created this zero -sum game.

And when we know when we have a zero -sum mindset of like, either win or lose, you're on my team, or you're not.

Like, it pushes us towards like living in threat mode.

It pushes us towards like, reaching for those cheap, extrinsic things to fulfill us.

And we're just miserable.

And as I kind of outline my thesis in the book is this is that a large reason why we're there is Because we're not fulfilling our basic psychological needs with good quality stuff We're reaching for the candy and we've known this for a long time going back to Robert Putnam's Bowling alone right in the 1980s wrote a wonderful book said hey all clubs activities hobbies are decreasing This is going to impact us And I think what we're seeing is the end result of that experiment on steroids with the internet social media because now the reason we have this politics of everything where we tie ourselves

to these ideas is because we know that belonging is a fundamental need.

And if there is nothing quality to fill fill it with, then what do we do?

We reach for our group identity.

We say, hey, this is my tribe on social media.

This is my tribe. I'm blah blah blah, and I'm gonna just cling and attach to it as hard as I can to fulfill that need.

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Rich Roll. There's an alignment problem because our environments are kind of pushing us towards this, you know, without us even cosigning it.

It's just sort of happening in the background.

All the tectonic plates of our external environment is kind of driving this result.

So in terms of opting out, to me, it feels like a big piece within this is on us.

We have to take individual responsibility to kind of rebut these forces in a way that maybe we never had to in the past. But at the core of being able to do that is this identity piece that you talk about in the book but that requires like a degree of real discernment.

Like you have to really know who you are so that you have a barometer or a compass that can point you towards whatever your true north is and be able to distinguish like what you actually care about and what you don't and how much?

Like what to really invest yourself in and where are the things that it's in your best interest to detach. I think the the issue and I think you're spot -on the issue is this is it used to kind of did that Development used to kind of take care of itself There wasn't an alignment problem the environment kind of pushed you in the direction of Happiness and fulfillment and meaning and connection in all of these things you exactly right we had even if you look at kids Kids had time to explore right they weren't in inundated with social media comparisons.

They explored locally right, so me and running, how did I fall in love with running?

I found out I was pretty good, right?

Not globally, just within my class, and middle school and beyond.

And if I had to compare myself to everyone, when I was a middle schooler playing soccer and running the mile, I'd look and I'd be like, oh my gosh, I'm so much slower than all these guys over here, and so much slower than many of the girls of the same age, Why would I pursue this?

But because the comparison was local I said, hey, I'm pretty good compared to everybody.

You know the 50 other kids who are in my class or grade or whatever.

Yeah. I'll keep doing this.

Now it's global. Can you imagine young Steve?

Like he runs up, you know, like a 558 or whatever a mile and he decides to post it on social media and just gets shellacked with like why that's a terrible time.

Exactly. And then what do you do?

You're like, I'm not doing this anymore.

Bingo, that's it. We have cut off the role for finding and exploring in a secure environment where we get to dabble long enough to see, do I enjoy this?

Am I good at it? Does it bring me significance and meaning?

Because if we post about it, share about it, we're gonna get killed essentially right away, right?

I'd be like, no, no, I'm not that good.

But the reality is none of us are that good until we try something for a long enough period of time, but we've kinda just kinda been done.

We're not allowed to not be good anymore.

And I even struggle this with myself, right?

Because as adults, what happens?

You stop trying to do things that you're not good at because you're used to being competent at things.

So we stopped trying new things.

And I think when we have societally something that shifts and pushes us from stop exploring, then we're going to end up in bad places, whether as adults or kids, because we don't get that natural cycle of exploring something until we figure out if we're good at it.

So what's the solution, Steve?

What have you discovered going down the rabbit hole of this problem?

Like how do we emerge out of it?

Just read my book and I'll give you all that.

But here's the nuance of it.

there's no great answers because there's societally things that we need to address.

But what I try and do is tackle what we can actually do on the individual side.

And I think if we simplify it to degree, I think we have these fundamental psychological needs to belong, we talked about.

We need some sort of direction or purpose.

We need to have some sort of coherence, meaning our individual and social self, we need to kind of make sense, right?

And we need to feel some sort of significance, like we're doing something meaningful.

If we can have those things, research tells us that we get to turn that threat alarm down a little bit.

And that's all we're talking about here, because if we can turn that threat alarm down a little bit, we feel secure.

We can explore when we need to.

We don't have to kind of shut down and get narrower and narrower.

So I think it's on us, both as individuals and in the environments we have control over is how do we help people and help ourselves, like fulfill those needs in a productive way?

Like, how do we reach for the vegetables instead of like the candy that's just kind of give us temporary fulfillment?

But, you know, an hour later, we're gonna feel miserable and hungry again, breaking that down to it's kind of elemental pieces.

A lot of this stuff is sort of stuff we intuitively know, like yes, we should choose the vegetable and not the candy and we need to do hard things and we need to feel like we're part of a community and we should do something that feels like it gives our lives a meaning, all of these things.

But it's in that gap that lives and breathes in between thought and action or like idea and execution that we get hamstrung, right?

So, you know, we could take a couple examples.

Imagine, you know, maybe it's a middle -aged man who is on a trajectory where he's starting to feel like, is this really, you know, what I'm supposed to be doing?

Or like, I remember when I used to do these things and they were fun and now I'm kind of out of shape and I'm in a job that doesn't feel like it's providing me meaning and, you know, after a long day, it's just hard to not eat ice cream and like the normal stuff, right?

Like, what is the first step or the kind of catalyst to like trigger somebody out of that rut and get them into kind of a new way of behaving?

Yeah, so this is the crux of the problem and it's the crux of coaching, which is behavior change.

It's easy to talk about hard to do.

But I think step one is actually that awareness and perspective, is identifying that like, hey, these things, maybe I'm feeling something that I don't appreciate or that doesn't feel fulfilled in this manner.

And that awareness is the thing that can push you towards, okay, not necessarily action, but exploring and understanding.

And what I mean by that is what research tells us, again, lots of psychology, tells us that our basic needs that we outlined are what we call substitutable, meaning I don't need them all from one place, and this is one of the fundamental mistakes we've made in society.

We try and get it all from our work, right?

Or all from our family life.

And what we need to do is look at, okay, here's all the things I can do in life.

Here's my work, my family life, my friends, my hobbies, et cetera, is I wanna diversify and dabble, and see what's interesting, and see what allows me to feel a little bit better or fulfilled in these ways.

So if your work sucks, but you know I need this paycheck, I can't just quit my job, then you look for avenues elsewhere.

You join your recreational softball team, right?

You volunteer to coach your kid's soccer team.

You look for other avenues that kind of fulfill and give you the significance and meaning in small, bite -sized ways.

I mean, I did it myself when I took up writing.

I didn't see myself as a writer, but I was coaching and then going through that whole whistleblower experience we talked about before, and I said, this coaching side kind of sucks in running.

I enjoy it, but it kind of sucks because I have this whole whistleblowing experience just raining down on my parade.

I need another outlet.

So I just started writing.

first for blogs, magazines, you know, eventually books.

But it was just, it wasn't I'm gonna become a writer, I'm gonna use this to fund my future life.

This was, I need another sense making outlet that gives me some sort of, you know, fulfills these things that running once did, but can't right now because of the situation I'm in.

I think the challenge for a lot of people is confronting their own perception of agency in their lives.

Like if you're in that state where things just don't feel like they're working, there is that sense that, like, you also lack the inability to change it.

And that's where the brain is very good at coming up with excuses why you can't or shouldn't and why that's scary and better to avoid and just stay in your lane.

I mean, overcoming that is a challenge, but I think what you're saying is essentially lower the bar of expectations.

If you were to say, I don't like coaching, or coaching isn't really doin' it for me, I'm gonna write books, well, I can't write it, but I've never written a book.

Those are people that write books.

Just create a safe space in which it's okay to fail and just do the tiniest part of it.

it's really kind of like a James Clear atomic habits thing.

Like what is the easiest lift that you feel like you can accomplish and just start to like stack those.

And this is again, a consequence of the environmentally living because what do we do?

We don't think, oh, I'm just gonna write my journal or notebook or post some blog.

We jump straight to the big thing because like the comparison tells us that, oh, if I'm gonna be a writer, I need to write books.

That's what everybody else does, but they forget that like, you know, young Steve before he became a successful author was writing all sorts of junk, I can send it to you with all sorts of grammatical mistakes that probably makes no sense, but I was out loud to do that because I didn't see it as, I didn't have this pressure of seeing it as like succeed or fail.

And it comes back to one of the things that prevents people is, we've internalized failure is, if we fail at something, it's I am a failure, instead of - The identity piece.

Yeah, it's the identity piece.

So lowering the bar, it's basically this.

Lowering the bar and doing anything that takes away that identity piece, it creates a little bit of space so that you can try and not be afraid of failing.

So, whether that's just in the writing example, writing for yourself, where that's sharing with friends, whether that's taking the smallest step to just explore something else in a safe and secure manner, those are the steps that we need to take.

In terms of running, I tell people this all the time who come up to me in our novices and are like, oh, Steve, you know so much about running.

What would your advice be to get started?

I'm like, don't run, start walking.

Because if I tell them to go run, that first run is gonna be miserable because they're not in good enough shape.

It's going to be hard no matter how slow they go.

And if every day I walked out the door for myself as a person who loves running, if every day was a hard workout in running, I would hate it too.

So we've got to have them like give people manageable bite sized chunks to allow them to make progress because we know going back to intrinsic motivation, what's the one of the biggest things that fuels that fire is like progress on something towards mastery.

So if we can see ourselves getting better, even on the smallest bit, it's gonna stoke that fire, stoke that fire, stoke that fire.

Yeah, the trick of the mind is that we think being better or being really good at something is what nourishes us.

When, in fact, it is the progression towards that is the real like kind of like nutrition.

It's the quest. It is, and one of my favorite studies I talk about in the book, they looked at Olympic swimmers.

And these are like Olympic medalists, some of the biggest names and they looked at and interviewed them, and what they found is that the vast majority of these athletes at some time had a performance mindset, which was like outcomes, achievements, I'm gonna define myself by this.

but at some point relatively early on in their career, they faced an adversity that made them reevaluate things, and they called it an adversity that made them switch to a quest mindset, which is exactly what you're talking about there, which is it's the progress, it's the exploration, it's the doing thing on the way to wherever we end up that makes us and is the important part, but we get distracted and think the important part is like achieving that end goal when it's not.

Yeah, the best modern example of that with respect to Olympic swimmers, I think, is Caleb Dressel, who anybody who saw him compete in Paris or knows a little bit about his story, this is a guy who was, you know, kind of poised to be the next Michael Phelps and was extremely successful and then struggled and had to contend and was some mental health stuff that really derailed his career.

And he had to find a way back.

And in order to do that, he had to confront these mental health challenges and begin to work through them which he did.

And that rejuvenated his love for this sport.

But the relationship was different, right?

It was no longer about performance and podiums necessarily and more about like this fulfilling quest that he was on.

And I think when you saw him get very emotional on the deck, I think it was him like really kind of like recognizing that in himself.

Like maybe he didn't achieve the goals that he had set for himself at the Olympics.

But to me, I read that as like gratitude for even being able to be there and like really like seeing it for what it was and like honoring himself for having like taken that journey.

I love that moment and I think it's so great and I think people discount those experiences and think that like oh, like that's not what got him there, right?

But that is the, I think that is the crux of performance because it allows us to free ourselves up to not only perform at a high level, but also have the perspective to understand and embrace it.

Mhm. Because there's so many athletes that I've worked with, you know who, they get the performance and it's wholly unfulfilling.

They thought it was gonna be X, Y and Z, but then they achieve it and they're almost like empty.

Because there was this implied promise that this was going to fill whatever hole that they have, right?

Bingo. And then they realize, well, you take yourself wherever you go, right?

And when you arrive, you're still the same person.

Even Alex Honnold who I wouldn't characterize as somebody who has a hole that he needed to fill and that's why he goes on these climbing pursuits.

He sat across from me and was like, yeah, I thought when I did all these things that I would be the man, and I didn't even know what the man was, but then I did it, and I was like, well, I'm still like me, I don't know who that man is, or whatever, you know, it's like.

It's another great example.

But it's identity, you know, it goes back to like this attachment to your identity being contingent upon these performance goals as opposed to holding it a little bit at arm's distance and saying like, I care about these goals.

But if I don't achieve them, it's not a threat to like, you know, the core of like who I am as a human being.

And I think this is at the very center of the existential crisis that I think a lot of people have particularly men upon whom there's a lot of pressure like their value is inextricably linked to their career trajectory and their bank account and all of these metrics, right.

And so to your point around the American dream and the sort of incentives of the world in which we live if you can't measure up to that then of course you're gonna feel like you're less than and that is really the definition of your identity.

That's the crux of it.

And I think coming to the nuance is it's not saying, hey, achievements don't matter or performance don't matter.

It's your relationship.

It's your relationship with them, right?

It's being able to say, okay, I'm gonna strive for this, but I'm still gonna have a little bit of space between this achievement or this goal and my sense of self.

And I think that's where the magic occurs.

And that's where if you look at elite athletes, early performers, and anything who find sustainable success over the long haul and aren't miserable, that's that sweet spot that they try and live in.

But I think again, environmentally, societally, we forget this other part and we say, hey, just just go achieve this and that will take care of everything and it's just not how we were you know fundamentally you know developed or evolved and I think to your point it's a really high burden in our current world because again I'm going to take us all the way back to the African savanna if you looked at it is very easy to achieve significance belonging you know a sense of identity when it's you and a couple dozen tribe members.

It's easy to find something where you can contribute.

In our world today, it's really freaking hard. And to your point, if you look on the data on especially young men, they're suffering to a much higher degree than even a couple decades ago when we were younger.

And one of the reasons I think is because we've set up this environment where it's really freaking hard to provide, be significant, et cetera, et cetera because in the end result is like, people feel kind of miserable and not motivated.

Yeah. What is the avenue where they can contribute and feel good about that contribution?

And if that's not available and they're in an environment in which opportunities are scarce, that becomes a challenge.

And it's unfair that that should all fall on the young individual to like figure out.

We should live in environments that are like, you know, kind of moving us towards that.

Yeah, inevitably. It is, but what we've done is again, society, I mean, a lot of the book is about narrowing the sprouting, but society we've narrowed those paths.

So if you're a young kid or young male, especially you coming out, you see only a handful of paths.

And what we need to do is create a world where it's like, okay, there's many different paths.

I mean, even you can see it in like going to college versus trade schools and things like that, like we've kind of minimized the non -college route and pushed everyone over here, but that minimizes potential paths for people.

And I know we're talking about young men, but it applies to everything.

I mean, the role model effect is real.

So my wife's a teacher, and there's all sorts of wonderful data that shows us essentially like one of the biggest impactors for young kids in school is being able to see a future in something, and there's data for instance on - we'll take teachers.

If a black kid has a black teacher, it increases his chance of graduating, going to college and being successful by, I forget the exact number, but something like 15 to 20%, okay?

Why? Role model effect.

You see a future and that future is a little bit more attainable because you have someone to relate to.

The same thing applies to whether we're talking about different jobs, avenues, anything is we've got to be able to see future paths.

And instead what we've done is kind of narrowed them so that it's kind of impossible.

at the same time, and this goes to the it's not a black or white thing and it's kind of yes and and both, we're also, I think it needs to be said like in an environment where we can find mentors and we can find inspiration and we can find role models in a way we never could before like any kid who goes on YouTube, can find somebody who looks like them who's doing something that they're interested in that 50 years ago would be impossible if you lived in a small town in Alabama or whatever, right?

Like, so the exposure to that type of inspiration is like at full blast right now.

And you can go on Spotify or Apple podcasts and find a podcast where somebody who does that thing that you're curious about is gonna tell you exactly how he figured out how to do it and create a career out of it.

So that too is also at play And yet, amidst the narrowing that you spoke to, doesn't seem to necessarily be the full antidote that we need.

Well, what is is is we've solved part of the problem with that.

Is we have what I call like distanced awareness, right?

I can go on YouTube, I can listen to many of the guests you've interviewed and say, hey, this is cool, I'm gonna try and exploit this.

But then we don't have the, but what I call like depth or local awareness because we've kind of given away those paths or understanding.

And I think we need to have some way to connect both and avenues to connect both to be able to give people potential paths.

I think the other aspect of it is again, if you come back to the idea of like we evolved to grow up in local communities.

In fact, archeologists and some scientists called it like the transition from known to anonymous societies.

So there's all sorts of data that showed that, again, way back in the day, tribes generally expanded to about 150 people.

And then they had infighting and split up.

And for, you know, millennia, they couldn't get past the 150 people number.

Until the solution was social institutions evolved.

So we started to have religion, marriage, things that researchers call men's club which were essentially things for men to do besides fight.

And these social institutions allowed us to break through this 150 person barrier to go move to anonymous society where we didn't have to know where it would be connected to everyone.

And the argument I would make nowadays is we're at another transition.

We went from a society that wasn't all interconnected, but was global to now we've hit this, like you're connected to everyone.

There's potential paths almost everywhere, but it's overwhelming and we need some sort of, I don't know what the answers are, but some sort of social institutions that say, okay, here's how we organize, here's how we do things.

Here's how we have paths that provide Like the ability to expand past that barrier.

At the same time that that's beyond the individuals sort of agency or capacity to create and turning back to like what we can do, what we do have control over, and perhaps our example of the middle aged person who's having this crisis of meaning.

To me, and let me know what you think of this, like I think the biggest piece obviously is your relationship to your own identity and being willing to go on that kind of inward journey to understand who you are.

But within that in terms of like the way out or like the spark to kind of snap you out of whatever situation you're in and move you towards a new one begins and ends with your relationship with curiosity which is kind of the generative force of every exploration.

So rather than say, well, I don't feel like my life's so meaningful so I guess I should run a marathon. Are you really curious about that?

Or is that just a reaction to an external stimuli because you've seen other people doing that and you don't know what else to do.

Instead, I think that the better path is to really understand your own curiosity.

The problem with that is that, it goes back to our environmental kind of incentives like this American, like capitalistic society is not conducive to everybody kind of create, sort of investing in their own curiosity.

Like in fact, our culture is an antagonist to curiosity because curiosity is a threat to security and kind of institutional, kind of rules and regulations, right?

Like if you have a job, You're not like directed to like, be curious, try things.

No, it's like stay within your lane, right?

To go back to what we said at the beginning.

So we cut off our relationship with our own curiosity to the extent of like not even noticing it or paying attention to it.

We've relegated it, you know, to some kind of dark place.

So when you say like, be curious or investing in your, it's like, I don't know what I'm curious about.

Like my whole life, I've kind of like never even thought about my own curiosity, right?

how do I even get back to that place where I can be curious and notice things.

And then when I do notice them, say, oh, I do feel like maybe I'd be interested in that and then follow that up with taking some kind of action to then go towards it.

You know what one of the biggest propellers of curiosity is, boredom, and we've eliminated boredom because what do you do?

If I'm standing in line at the airport, I pull out my phone, and then I scroll mindlessly.

And the algorithm will say, I know what you're curious about, but are you or are you just impolst in some kind of addictive way that's being directed by your lizard brain.

Right, that's it. So, and again, what psychology research tells us is that like, if you're bored for a little bit, your brain then pushes you to find some sort of solution, which is where curiosity comes from.

Again, look at young kids, right?

What do they do when they're bored?

They often create games, right?

They pick up a stick in the yard and start playing war, whatever it is.

Because they're filling that space.

And what we need to do is get back to moments in our lives where we have more of that.

This is why I love running and love exercise, or love walking, whatever it is, because I will leave my phone at home and I will go off.

And just raw dog it.

And I'll just go, right?

What a courageous man you are.

But it's almost like you're cutting against the grain to even go running without your earbuds in and the latest podcast or music, the album that dropped.

But I'll tell you this, 100%, if I didn't do that, I would not be writing books.

Because most of either my ideas or the solving of how in the hell am I gonna make this connect and work in this book comes either on a walk or a run without, you know, a podcast or things.

And I'm not... Look, I love podcasts but I listen to them intentionally.

When I go on a run, I use that as my curiosity tongue.

Let's let my mind wander.

And whether yours is running, walking, some sort of meditative experience, doing things without, you know, being plugged I think we have to figure out ways in our environment to bring that back.

And the other thing I would say in terms of curiosity is we need more, what I'll just call play, because again, the kid example, what sparks curiosity, you're playing.

And in fact, some recent researchers came out and had this big statement that said, hey, one of the reasons why the youth health mental crisis is coming around is because we've over organized everything to death so that kids aren't playing.

Because if you look at the role play fulfills with kids is it teaches them how to interact.

It teaches them how to develop their own rules and constraints, et cetera.

Teaches them how to solve problems and like explore.

And I think as adults, you're probably saying, well, I'm not gonna go out in the yard and swing or what have you, But what's a what's play for adults think about it?

I mean as a writer play for me is Reading and exploring ideas with no in -game insight Saying you know what and I'll do this I'll go on I call them down the rabbit hole days where I get sparked by maybe a research paper Or an interview or even a podcast I listen to and I say you know what I don't know if this is gonna go anywhere there, but I'm just going to spend a couple of hours and just go down the rabbit hole.

One article to the next or one interview to the next, and learn more about it.

And most of the times, nothing comes out of it, but every once in a while, it sparks that curiosity and then it turns into a major chapter or part of a book or something else, and it has that end result that is valuable, but I didn't start down that path, saying, oh, Well, I'm gonna use this to create my next book.

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Vroom. I do agree that running is like the ultimate kind kind of instigator for kind of creative thoughts and curiosity.

I wonder maybe you know this, like, is there science around how being in a kind of elevated state of exertion in that kind of like comfortable zone two state where your blood is pumping and lends itself to your brain kind of being to inhabit that space?

Yep, there's lots of science.

And here's what it goes.

Is there's a sweet spot in terms of what we just call physiological arousal.

So think stress response, adrenaline, et cetera.

If we get elevated enough, it enhances our cognition and our thinking.

If we go too elevated, we stop being able to think because that attention has to be direct towards the activity we're doing.

So if I'm running VO2 max intervals or something, I can't be creative because all my resources are diverted towards like surviving the interval.

But if I'm running an easy run, what happens is we get elevated enough, we get blood flow, we get the adrenaline, we get the arousal going, but it's mindless enough where my brain is free to wander.

So you have this nice interaction between, we'll just call it the - the thinking part of our brain, the executive function, and the default mode network or the like more creative side.

In easy runs, they're like at like this peak where they both can interact together without getting in the way.

If we go too hard, we essentially shut down part of that thinking and creativity.

The problem arises for me though, because that's the place where I have all these ideas.

I've learned that I often like, forget them.

You know, it's sort of like a dream.

Like you're like, that's an amazing idea and then you're done and then.

And so I do bring my phone with me, but then I find myself stopping all the time cause make a voice memo or to like, you know, put it in my notes app or whatever.

So I decided to forget it.

And if you're really in that space, you gotta stop a lot in order to do that or to pull it out and like, which is obviously every time you do that you're interrupting that flow.

I need someone listening to make a device that doesn't interrupt where I can record ideas.

So Rich and I could just somehow record ideas without disrupting it because I, same deal, there have been so many times I figured out something or thought I have, and then been like, oh crap, I've got to make it like the three miles home without forgetting the thing.

I know, I know. So then, if you are in that place where I don't know what I'm curious about, it doesn't have to be running.

But if you can find some kind of activity to where you can inhabit that like elevated state, like maybe that's a nice trigger.

Yeah, exactly. It's like, think of it as like, how do I put myself in these states just slightly more often?

Again, lowering the bar, but slightly more often to get curious and then give myself the ability to dabble long enough to see if that curiosity turns into interest or passion.

And you see this like good companies do this, right?

It's the old classic like 3M example, right?

where they had 15 % time, which basically meant, you know, 15 % of the week, they got to just go do or explore whatever they wanted to during company time.

And some great ideas came out of that.

Like the sticky notes came out of that.

Other companies have copied stuff like that, but you need to have like this time and period where you just get to explore things and dabble long enough to see if they're interesting.

and, you know, some things won't, and that's fine.

But if we never go on that journey, then we never spark that curiosity, we never get that exploration kind of gene going, and instead, we stick to narrow, comfortable, you know, same old, same old, and then our identity tends to, you know, constrict around, you know, whatever it is.

We get that kind of numbness of experience.

It's harder in the work context unless you have a management structure that is conducive to those sorts of activities.

I mean, Ed Capnol comes to mind like what he's done around.

The importance of cultivating creativity in the workplace and taking failure off the table, because to do something different in that construct is a threat to job security, right?

So it creates this constriction, but outside of that, to take failure off the table, you just have to shift your relationship to it to not be a goal oriented thing, but rather like to your point earlier, like just an exercise in curiosity or an exploration, right?

So it's, a lot of it is around like terminology because we have this weird kind of obsession with success and failure in a binary context, but to just use different words to convince yourself that this is not like that.

All you're trying to do is convince your brain that it's okay to try and fail.

I mean, this is like what?

You're not gonna die or get kicked out of your tribe.

That's it. Because when we activate these things, our brain goes, okay, I'm gonna be alone and get kicked out of my tribe.

I can't try this. And that's the circuitry that is there.

In so much of life, especially in a world, as we've talked about, where failure is public, if we look at the number one thing that causes things like choking in sport or the yips or whatever have you, it is fear of public failure.

Choking doesn't occur in private.

Okay, why? Because as humans, if we fail publicly and we're trying at something that is central to our sense of self, that pushes us, our brain just freak out.

And so much of whether we're talking a sport, performance or creativity is figuring out these almost like mental games to convince our brain or convince the people you're working with brain to be like, okay, that's not gonna happen.

Like if you mess up on this cartoon creation or this writing assignment, like your life isn't over.

The lion isn't going to eat you.

an existential threat and again, that goes back to your relationship with identity.

I mean, that's what you just said is like at the core of Michael Gervais book, fear of other people's opinions.

Yeah, and like how that's that short circuits mastery.

Yeah. I mean, it's one of those things that is simple to talk about, but really freaking hard to do.

Why is it so hard? Cause we're human.

Cause we have this, we have an inbuilt psychological immune system that wants to convince ourselves that we are the hero of the story, that we are a good person and that we're going to be okay and it will do anything possible to defend anything that comes against us.

So when failure or threat threatens us, our psychological immune system goes into a hyperactive state and says, no, no, we're gonna like shut that down.

We're gonna disconnect from that.

We're gonna make sure that that doesn't attack us.

What is your sense of how learnable, teachable these things are?

On some level when you look at people or perhaps like athletes that you've coached and you see people who kind of understand these principles naturally and are able to kind of be adaptable in their environments.

That's often a function of the environments in which they were raised when their brains were still kind of forming and those neural pathways were kind of being created in an environment where they did feel safe and the parenting and all of that was kind of like dialed in to create this individual who could be healthy in the world.

Short of that somebody else who maybe has an attachment disorder or didn't have certain emotional needs met and they're in the world with completely different neural pathways that you then have to undo and kind of rewire.

It's a situation in which that person is going to struggle a little bit more and is gonna be more resistant in that kind of transition.

So the good news is this.

Just about everything is trainable to a degree.

Now, are you going to go from like, am I gonna go from, you know, maybe not that good to Zen master?

Probably not, right?

If my environment like doesn't, isn't conducive to that or my genetics or what have you.

But everything is trainable to a degree.

and we know this from some wonderful research in neuroscience that has looked at things, especially along like mental health disorders, like obsessive compulsive disorder, because what are you doing there except just retraining your pathways in your brain to stop seeing a threat everywhere?

And although it is really hard, especially for severe cases, there is improvement even among severe cases, right, Where we see if we follow this path if we like retrain our brain and those pathways a little bit We can stop getting our fear centers to think that like hey There's a threat around every corner and we're going to be okay now Or are we going to take that person and make them like OCD free.

No, probably not But we're going to get them to a state where they can be okay and perform and like live life And I think that is true whether we look at that from mental health standpoint, or whether we look at this from a performance standpoint, because we can see it in other areas where we take athletes, for instance who suffer the extreme versions of like the yips, there are successful cases of people getting rid of it and getting back to high performance.

Why? Because all of these pathways are to a degree, trainable if we again do the right things to convince our brain that this threat might be there, but it doesn't have to be at the level that it is right now.

We can turn it down from a nine to a four.

And if we're at a four, we can function, right?

And that's the key.

In other words, you may not be able to ever surf 100 foot wave like Garrett McNamara, but if surfing is something you're curious about, like go first, like go out and paddle on a flat lake, you know, and then maybe get a little half foot wave and try to stand up.

Like these things happen over time by creating, by putting yourself in a situation that's just risky enough to manage and then developing the resilience that comes with every kind of like notch up from there.

It's a long path. This is why we struggle with it because it takes time to like get that effect to have or that adaptation.

It's a slow path. But if you stick at it on whether we're talking about physical pursuits or mental pursuits, the research is clear and the science is clear is that a long time spent and like slowly adapting our mind or body works.

Can we shift gears and bust a few fitness myths I can't have you here, I'm down and not like have you kind of roll up your sleeves and you know get into the muck a little bit.

You've been coaching athletes for a long time you are well -versed in the science of speed and endurance and it must come with some frustration to pay witness to the discourse that you see online around concepts like zone two training, high intensity training, VO2 max, terms that are getting thrown around quite a bit, even more so than a couple of years ago.

Do it no small part to everybody's fascination around like emerging longevity science, right?

And so now we have these like sort of longevity influencers out there or who are using these terms. Some are using them appropriately, some not so much. But I think it's creating a lot of confusion for people who are interested in like, should I be doing like, you know, a lot of zone two and when do I do my strength workout and when do I need that kind of high, higher intensity and like, what am I supposed to think about like VO2 max and its relationship not only to my fitness still like, but also like, in terms of like how long I'm going to live.

do you have like a manifesto on this?

I don't even know where to start with all of this because there's so much here.

We could go for the hours Rich. But let me just, why don't I start with this one?

I just have Rhonda Patrick in here the other day who I think is super smart.

And I think she's, you know, highly, somebody who operates with a lot of integrity and is deep into the science.

And she has done a lot of work around the importance of high intensity training, which she would call like vigorous exercise, right?

And the relationship of that with this marker VO2 max and the importance of that marker in terms of longevity.

And so for the time crunched individual, she's basically saying like the 80 -20 rule, which is like do most of your, 80 % should be like your zone two or whatever and 20 % the more high intensity stuff that if you don't have very much time that that should be something you should focus on more because it kind of moves the needle much more so than if you only use that short amount of time for zone two.

So I guess there's that piece.

And then there's also the kind of emphasis around all the energy around like VO2 max as this important marker.

All right, so let's break this down.

And I agree. I think Rhonda Patrick is great at science communication.

It's like the the OG of it.

So I have a lot of respect for VO 2 Max as a marker Okay, let's let's start with this if you look at all the research that does tie VO 2 max to longevity Almost all of it Does not measure VO 2 max?

What they do is they do a fitness test sometimes an actual VO 2 max test but they use the peak speed and treadmill incline as the marker that gets tied to longevity or in other cases what they do is they do a submax test that Then they estimate VO 2 max with To get tied to longevity.

So what does that mean practically?

practically, it means that it's not Necessarily VO 2 max it is tied to longevity it is endurance performance because if you sit me up on a treadmill and say hey go run to exhaustion in 10 minutes which is essentially a VO two max test how fast you get at the end of the treadmill yes that spits out a VO two max number if I'm you know on the equipment but what matters more is how fast you got on the treadmill at the end of the session if you reach 10 miles an hour or 11 miles an hour or 12 miles an hour or what have you.

That is what's tied to longevity.

So to me, I love some VO two max conversation, I like to simplify things.

You don't need to go to lab to understand your VO two max to see if you're going to live longer based on the research or the longevity piece.

All you need to do is go down to the track and go run a mile or do the equivalent and cycling, swimming, anything moderately aerobic, and the faster you are, the better your predicted longevity will be, and I think that that message is a little bit more practical than telling someone like, hey, go figure out your VO2 max number, because what do most people do?

They go look at their watch, which gives you estimated VO2 max, which, you know, the research on that is like, some watches do it pretty well, some are all over the freaking place.

So, and you don't have to be a mile.

It can be anything moderately aerobic, anything from a couple of minutes to 10, 15, 20 minutes.

Go sign up for your local 5K, do something pretty hard, see what it is, and then improve on that, and you're improving on your marker for longevity.

In other words, stop obsessing about this marker as an endgame, but look at it rather as a byproduct of doing all these other things that will naturally, and it is interesting.

Like when you, of course, elite athletes aren't really concerning themselves with longevity and their VO2 max, numbers are incredibly high, but not because they're focused on elevating them, only because they're focused on the training that the VO2 max of which is a byproduct of that.

So there was a lot of like energy around Tade Pagaccio going on Peter Rotea's podcast and Peter is someone who's very interested in VO2 Max and curious about it and somebody who is you know, a longevity expert.

And it seemed to me that he was somewhat surprised that Tade was sort of dismissive of this or like not all that interested in like measuring it very often and and that's just because like that and it's the same with Christian Blumenfeld right like these guys have incredibly high VO 2 max's but that's not like what they're aiming towards you know I've I've run many VO 2 max's I've done them with other athletes as a physiologist but the reason for that at the elite level especially is because of all the components of endurance performance it's the least trainable meaning it will boost up, but at some

point your lactate threshold, your running economy, your anaerobic speed reserve, all of these, your, your, you know, uh, fuel intake, all of these things are way more trainable than VO two max.

So in the coaching world, we generally say VO two max is going to take care of itself if we don't train like an idiot, because it's got to reach a natural number and then kind of fluctuate a little bit, but it It stays, it stays.

It's not something that's wildly vacillating.

Right, so yeah, exactly.

My lactate threshold, my speed at lactate threshold will vacillate more, right?

Based on if I'm doing more of that work, or if I'm not.

And that's why in the endurance community, we measure the thing to get an idea, but we don't tie everything to it.

And I think in the longevity community, they've missed that lesson a little bit and that they tie too much to it because it's a nice round number that tells us something and it's like fancy.

And we tie something to it without realizing like, hey, like holistic, endurance performance.

You know, holistic performance is probably the better thing to worry about, which includes all these other things.

So like, let's just worry about getting people a little bit fitter.

Right, but then you're opening up the Pandora's box of like, well, how do we get there, right?

And is it a function of endurance or this tempo threshold work?

I think people really kind of like the idea of the hard threshold tempo, high intensity training sort of thing, and aren't exactly all that enthusiastic about like all the zone two stuff.

Although there is a lot of energy, like people are fascinated in a way that I would have never predicted.

I can't believe how many people are like so into this notion, which is cool.

My sense is that things are as they always have been, which is like, yes, you need threshold and you need speed and you need to kind of get that lactate going and all of that.

Whether you're an endurance athlete or a sprinter or an average human being.

But all of these things are built upon a foundation without which you're never gonna reach your potential.

and that foundation, fundamentally, is building your aerobic engine and the resilience that comes with it on top of which you then build all of these other things, and you can't short circuit that.

We have 120 years of history of training to tell us exactly what you just said, and this is where I'm a science nerd, but I love going towards the history of training because it's essentially this natural evolution of training where coaches from the late 1800s to now have progressively figured out, okay, this works a little bit better.

This works a little bit better.

And what we've known for at least the past 60, 70 years is exactly what you outlined is that if we care about performance, yeah, the sexy stuff of high intensity stuff matters, but if we do that without a foundation, our improvement is capped.

Yeah, you will plateau.

You will plateau. And furthermore, I would argue your risk of overtraining, especially if you're a novice, is higher because you don't have as much gap to make a mistake because if you have aerobic foundation, you can handle a little bit more and you can bounce back quicker from the intense stuff.

If I don't have that, And I'm running intervals every day or every couple days.

Overtraining, it's going to happen at some point.

And we know this as a college coach, I would look at this all the time because you'd get high school kids and some high school kids are really well trained.

And some had like the assistant football coach as their cross country coach, who just stood at the track and timed them every day and they did intervals.

And you'd see, you'd be like, Hmm, how come this kid ran really fast in the early season then performances got way worse?

It's like oh you had a football coach telling him You know repeats on the track every day and his aerobic base was gone so We know this now time crunch for for novice or recreational people is a real thing you can't Replace it all with high intensity stuff and expect to over the long haul like, get the benefits you need.

You might not have the balance of like the 80 20 rule because you're not running that much or you know, doing much endurance, but you have to have some sort of aerobic foundation or aerobic base in order to maximize or even get most of the benefits of the intense stuff.

And if you don't like, it's a recipe for disaster, I was comes back to you.

This is elite performance, but I think it applies generally to everyone.

Frank Shorter, gold medalist, legend in the marathon, way back in the day said, when asked about his training, he essentially said two hard workouts, a long run and as much mileage as I can handle, repeat for months and years on end.

And it's still the case.

It's still the case.

Like we can argue over the nuance of, well, should this be at like lactate threshold or a 10K base or 5K base or repeat 400s or miles?

and I get that I have those arguments all the time, but those are playing in the details and those details mainly matter when you're at the upper echelon of like trying to maximize your performance.

But for most people, it is essentially, you know, can you get one or two hard workouts a weekend where you're going something that makes you breathe kind of hard and then lots of easy stuff and do that consistently for months on end.

on some level, the arguments around the margins are from a psychological perspective, like a sort of masturbatory, excuse making machine that gets in the way of just going out and doing the thing, like you feel like you're doing it if you're arguing about these things rather than actually executing on the thing that's gonna move you forward. But I think to take that a little bit out of the abstract into kind of a practical example that maybe, you know, people can understand who are less familiar with these ideas.

And tell me if you agree with this.

If you are somebody who's doing a lot of interval work, notice how quickly you're able to recover in those time periods in between the interval, like how much time do you need in order to go hit it hard again?

Or if you're on a, you're out riding your bike and you're doing, you know, you're kind of riding along and then you attack a hill, how long does it take for your heart rate to come back down to where it was when you were at the bottom of the hill, right?

And that is a pretty good marker of where you are in terms of your aerobic fitness.

And if it takes you a while, or you're doing an interval set and what felt easy on that first interval by the sixth or the eighth interval, you're like, you know, struggling to even complete it, or you're really falling off a cliff in terms of trying to keep these things even, that's because you don't have an aerobic fitness foundation.

I couldn't have said it better myself.

I totally agree. It's a quick easy marker that tells you, and I'll tell you this as someone who runs 35 to 40 miles a week when I used to run a hundred, even my recovery between intervals, when I do them now, is not anywhere close to what it used to be because I know I don't have...

I have a good aerobic base, but not the lead aerobic foundation that I used to.

And even I can tell, you know what?

On these 400 meter repeats, I used to be able to take 45 seconds, I'm digging 90 seconds.

Why? Because that's my foundation isn't there.

And that applies to the lay person as well, is understand like when you do something hard, are you instantly bending over, catching your breath, having a hard time or not.

And if you are, that tells you that like, hey, maybe you need to do a little aerobic stuff because at the end of the day, I like to simplify training is this, is if we see a seesaw on one side, we have the endurance side, another we have speed or intensity, and we want to build that up progressively so that it is balanced for their event we're taking on.

So a balance for a mile will be different from a marathon, but it still needs to be balanced.

And what we try and do is we realize, hey, we need to build this aerobic side up a lot because the speed side is heavy.

So when we start adding blocks to the speed it's easy to get it unbalanced.

But if we built that aerobic side a lot we can add more speed and intensity and maintain that balance and be in a good spot.

Hmm you got in some heat on social media for responding to a tweet where somebody was comparing I think it was around the time of the Paris Olympics comparing like the physiques of sprinters to that of marathoners Saying like it's pretty obvious like who's healthier based upon you know How they physically present and you you took a bite on that one and that turned into like that that turned into like a news recycle do you want to explain that I just think that we've fallen for what I'd call is performative health meaning how health looks instead of what it really is and I think if we look at you

know often we see these memes where it's like you know Sprinter versus endurance athlete and people are like oh why would You wanna look like the emaciated elite marathon runner and the completely jacked 100 meter runner.

Bingo. But if you look at the data, and I'm the scientists that go by the data, there's been tons of studies that I've looked at, former Olympians, elite athletes and a variety of sports.

And what most of the data says essentially, is that endurance or mixed event athletes have better longevity.

Sprint, speed, power, strength, pure strength athletes tend to have lower longevity, and it makes sense physiologically because like, yes, we need to do strength.

Don't get me wrong.

If you're caring about longevity, you need to do strength.

And I'd argue you need to do some sort of speed, power, and sprint every once in a while as well.

But our bodies evolve for efficiency and if we're like jacked, we're not very efficient.

We don't have many mitochondria like and the mitochondria density isn't there to handle the energetic load of the force output that we have there.

So again, I love sprinting.

I love all that stuff, but if we're looking at purely from a health standpoint and longevity like the endurance athlete like there's a reason we used to be persistent hunter persistent hunters.

Right? It's for the efficiency of the thing.

You said also back to the point of the aerobic base that you know there there's sort of a narrative like oh the long run is dead like it that contrarian sort of like everything you thought and you knew about running is wrong, long run is dead, It's just you know, junk miles, etc. And you're like, the average collegiate 800 meter runner runs way more than the, you know, kind of amateur average, you know, person who's training for a marathon. It's true.

Like, so I looked at some data that they looked at, you know, hundreds of thousands of Strava data points or runners, Strava runners for training for a marathon, and they break it down, a study broke it down from, You know, basically sub 230 to sub 3 hours, etc, etc. And if you look at the 3 hour to 330 hour marathoner, it's pretty damn good.

Like, that's that's not bad.

Like, that takes some training on average.

They run about 40 ish miles a week, 40 ish.

Now, I'm not trying to downplay that's good, but you're training for a twenty six point two mile race.

Right. And if you look at a college 800 runner, again, there's variation.

But typically they'll run between 45 and up to 70 miles a week.

And they're training for an event that takes a minute and 45 or 50 seconds, okay?

Versus one that takes three hours.

And my point there is to say this is, is that I understand why your three -hour and change marathoner doesn't train that much because probably life.

But if we look at it as a coach and we say, Okay.

How does that person want to improve?

I'm gonna tell you it's not their interval training or their you know, repeats that they're doing It's figuring out how to accumulate more aerobic volume some of that could be running some of that could be cross training because that's where it is because an elite marathon or someone trying to Maximize their performance is gonna do, you know two to three times that and I'll tell you again, I'm I'm a 40 -year -old guy who runs with my daughter in stroller and runs 40 miles a week, and if you ask me to do a marathon tomorrow, I could do it, but my performance is going to be nowhere close to what I'm

capable of, and sometimes we complicate things, and it comes back to something that I had to learn when I was a freshman in high school, when I was running five days a week during practice, and my coach came up to me and said, Steve, you want to get better?

I said, yeah. Said step one, run on the weekends.

And we're not practicing.

Said, okay, guess what?

I got better. And I think often we over complicate things.

So if you're a four hour marathoner, you're essentially running like nine minute plus miles, right, like that's not very fast. So does that person need to go to the track and throw down max interval sets?

Because if all they need to do is go from a nine minute per mile to an 8 .30 per mile, there's no fast running involved at all in that.

The way to achieve that is just by building your aerobic base.

Yes, it's the exact thing that I did when I started coaching high school and you'd get the freshman in who had never run before and is running like nine, 10 -minute miles because they've never done anything.

And you say, okay, what are we gonna do?

No intervals, no workouts with the varsity or JV kids.

We're gonna just do some running and increase our mileage.

And some of that would be with breaks and walk jogs, et cetera, but we're just increasing our mileage.

And I think that holds true if you're looking at going from nine minute pace, most of the program, if I was writing a program for them, would be increasing volume in safe ways, gradual ways, and then throwing in like, hey, let's do some feel good strides every once in a while.

And that's it for a long time.

Yeah, to go from a nine minute to an eight minute.

You're taking 26 minutes off your marathon time without ever running fast. Speed isn't the limiting factor if you're talking about nine minute miles, for most people, right?

It only becomes a factor when you start to get up, you know, kind of below seven minute per mile pace.

Yeah, the way we look at everything is simple is you look at the gap between the race distance you're running and you're kind of like speed component.

So simple idea, if I'm running a, if I'm coaching a lead marathoner And she's trying to run a 220, but she's only run 69 minutes for a half marathon, which is just faster than 70 You know, she need to run I gotta work on good and a little faster in the half marathon I could do the same going from half marathon did to 10k 10k to 5k We look at the gap between the distances between like the speed and endurance, right and At the highest level you're playing with that gap.

Sometimes you're being like, okay We gotta get our 5k time down so we have a bigger gap.

So then then we can build our endurance on top of that.

When we look at novices, often what we're doing is like the endurance just isn't there.

So that like the gap is huge in terms of if I took them down to the track and said, hey, go run 100 meters or 400 or what have you, there's enough speed there.

It's just, they're not fit enough to like have the endurance to do the thing.

So we've got to spend a lot of time, and it comes down to, I think one of the reasons it's not popular is this, is yeah, there's the time component, but I'd argue this is that if you do an interval session well and include the warm up and cool down, the time component cancels itself out.

Because you can't just go down to the track and say, hi, I'm going to go run some hard intervals.

You got to warm up and do some strides and maybe some drills or flexibility stuff.

it takes time, and then you're tired afterwards so you wait around before you cool down.

So the time component, I never really buy that unless you're doing your intervals dangerously.

Meaning that same amount of time if you had just done a zone two run.

I mean, the other piece to that also is that if you're executing on those intervals properly, you actually need a lot of time to recover from them, which impairs your ability to train consistently and regularly.

So if you just do that zone two run instead of those intervals, you can wake up the next day and do another zone to run.

Whereas those intervals will prevent you from doing anything hard for a certain amount of time.

Exactly. So I think for most people, it's like, how do I figure out, again, like Frank Shorter said years ago, how do I figure out how to get consistent, good enough of that easy stuff for a long period of time?

And then we worry about it.

And I think the key is for most people is like, take bite -sized chunks.

Like if all you can do is fit in 30 minutes, great.

Do 30 minutes. But then over time you want to go 40 minutes and 50 minutes and 60 minutes and the great thing about running, I love cycling and swimming, but I'm biased towards running.

The great thing about running is, is I don't have to go run for three, four hours, like on the bike because the pounding prevents me from doing it.

Even if I was training at a high level when I was running a lot of mileage, I, Yeah there's something better Yeah.

So there's the there's the cap.

So my advice to everybody out there asking and yelling about zone 2 and hit and blah blah blah is like just keep it simple get a lot of endurance work in.

At some point you're going to notice you're fit enough to train like I think we need to get fit enough to train before we train.

Once you've been enough to train, then start having fun with it.

You can do all these sorts of things.

I think that piece that you just said just then is the key thing to understand about someone like David Roche.

Like, are you familiar with David Roche?

So he's like, he's on the podcast this week.

And I think what he's doing is really interesting and cool all of his like high -intensity work and like having his treadmill at an insane grade and like studying competitive eaters and experimenting with his ability to like absorb carbohydrates and bicarbonate and all these things.

But these are like, these are, he's allowed to play in those margins because he has 18 years of doing exactly what you said.

And I think what gets missed or what we conveniently want to kind of dismiss about his story and his recent successes is the fact that he has this base that he built for like almost two decades before he began to play with all of these other things.

This is the number one, like misunderstood thing and I'll use myself as an example.

Again, I run 35 to 40 miles a week.

I could go out tomorrow and run a 420 mile off of, Which is insane.

Off of very little.

But it's, why? Because I've been running at a relatively high level over 25 years in that aerobic volume, even though I'm not doing as much now is still there as long as I'm maintaining it to a degree.

And that is the key.

If you look at the success, for instance, recently in the US we've had a lot of really successful older marathoners, especially on the female side who are in their late 30s or early 40s, for instance, Sarah Hall.

Sarah Hall just broke her record. Yeah, and one of the reasons is that That is because they've been consistent for a really long time so that they can then play with some of these things like you're suggesting there.

For example, for years I worked with Roberta Groener.

Now, she's coached by someone else, but she just broke the, I think, 45 -plus Masters record running 229 or so in the marathon. If you look at her volume, it's nowhere compared to what she was doing seven, eight years ago.

But she doesn't have to because she's had a lifetime of accumulating this.

So you get to experiment with like, hmm, how should I combine these threshold runs or this like VO2 max work or this intense interval stuff or the fueling or whatever you have you.

That's when you get to play with the margins because like you're fit enough where you know, you can.

If you build it correctly it persists like it's there kind of latent in the background.

your strength gains and your speed and your ability to be nimble and accelerate, those things, you know, fall apart quickly as soon as you stop doing them and you have to work really hard to get them back.

But that reservoir of endurance just sort of lingers there and you can tap back into it.

And that doesn't mean it is what it was.

But it doesn't kind of like completely go away.

Yeah, if I stopped sprinting, I get slow, right?

because those neural components kind of like to really you know, get those fast switch fibers going.

They fade relatively quickly, but on the endurance side, the decay is so much slower, which is why we see so many endurance athletes or ultra endurance athletes like excelling at, you know, in later in later phases of life, like we can't do the hundred meters like we could when we were 21, you know?

But you know, maybe we can go a hundred miles in a way that we couldn't when we were that age because of those many decades of you know, kind of being an explorer in that endurance world.

And I would also argue that like, the longer endurance stuff where you also benefit is coming back to our early conversation is you have some of the mental skills that you did when you were younger.

So you can navigate some of the pain, the fatigue.

you can understand how to listen to your body better.

You can let go of someone, Sarah Hall, who we talked about earlier, I wanna talk about her in the book, but I worked with her for a number of years, one of the things that led to her breakthrough later in life was she essentially said, I let go of this performance outcome achievement thing.

Yeah, there it's not a threat to your identity anymore.

You're like it doesn't matter.

Yeah, you're you know You're 40 you have kids to get care of you have family you have a life you have perspective And sometimes have perspective hits us too late to take advantage of it I guarantee you now if I could transport like, you know 40 -year -old Steve into 20 -year -old Steve's body Oh to run so much faster Well we all, you know, yes, if only all of us could do that.

Right. That, you know, that's that's the longevity hack I need.

But the point is like is from a physical standpoint and from a mental reservoir standpoint is like we have this accumulated wisdom that we can tap into that often is kind of like a neglected part of the experience and the journey.

And why I think it's important to whether your thing is running cycling, another sport, another hobby.

I don't care, but have things in your life that like continue to challenge you in these ways because they bring so much, not just physical benefits, but also mental.

Sarah just ran 228.

Is that what she ran?

223. I think she ran 223.

223, yeah, that's unbelievable.

What is her PR? Do you know?

220 and change. So only three minutes slower than her best time.

which reminds me, speaking of like longevity and performance declines with age, you wade in on the Jake Paul Tyson fight, when everyone's like, well, Mike Tyson's Mike Tyson, but he is, you know, 50, how's this gonna go?

It was an interesting kind of thought experiment because nobody was as powerful and fast and as fierce as Tyson at his prime.

So on some level, he's like an outlier.

and how much does age factor in when you're somebody who was just so much better than everyone else who's gonna now face somebody who's in their prime age for that particular sport.

And the way that you contextualized it was by sharing master's records in running and to show kind of like the curve of how these things decline over time, no matter what.

I think there it was interesting because we had the perfect comparison in running because the Masters I think 55 plus hundred meter record was set by game guy named Willie Galt who was it he was the guy who was the guy so NFL player, you know set the world record on the four by one we knew we could perform at like was a freak at his peak and then we So he had his 55 plus year old age, right, you know, and when you saw it, he's still amazingly fast, no 11 point something, right?

But if you compare that, you realize like, oh, that's like a very good high school girls' time for the 100, which tells us that like speed and power, although it's in the legs, like, it has a steep decline, especially once we get to 50, 55, 60 years old.

And I think that's what we saw with Tyson is that age is undefeated even among freaks of freaks.

We're all gonna sustain, despite maybe someone's gonna solve it, but despite what I think what we've seen in the health and wellness field is it's still gonna win.

So when you look at these longevity influencers and, you know, in particular, like let's take Brian Johnson, right?

Who, you kind of had to go out for, you know, he was sharing his VO2 max numbers and you kind of like, you know, you spanked him a little bit on that.

But, but in terms of, in terms of like, you know, this idea of like, defying death and aging, you know, where, where do you weigh in my friend?

You're just going all the controversial things.

you're the one who, who like went out there and made a statement about these things.

Here's what, here's what.

And then I'll get to the answer your question, but Brian Johnson, this is why.

Okay. This guy is known for optimizing and tracking everything, everything.

And if you look at his VO to max protocol fitness, it is not optimized.

I think you said it's like 30 years out of date or something.

It's not. What? What's wrong with it and what should he be doing?

So what he's doing, and maybe he's updated, hopefully he's updated.

If you want some advice, call me Brian.

Happy to give it for free.

But what he was doing is essentially his doing four by four minutes VO2 max work, repeating that, multiple times per week.

This is the Norwegian - Like, this is Ron has spoke about this the other day as well.

Yeah, and here's the deal.

Well, that got popular because someone studied it because some Norwegian cross country skiers were doing it and said, hey, it works pretty well.

But there are a million variations of the same work out that will get the same result.

They just have not been researched and studied because researchers generally don't study individual workout types because it's really hard to run that study and the data isn't actually that good because we have to constrain things from a research standpoint.

So the reason it's wrong is because no individual athlete unless we look at again 30 40 years ago is going to repeat the same style of workout over and over again without some variation of intensities.

It comes back to that to what we talked about earlier it's like his better approach would be a little about more easy running or easy exercise whatever it is and then a mixture of of interval training where sometimes you're going around threshold, sometimes you're going around 5K pace, sometimes you're doing this.

Why? Because that's gonna maximize the thing that he actually cares about which is like the overall aerobic performance which is tied to longevity.

If you're doing the same workout every single day your body adapts to that, right?

So it no longer is producing the stimulus that was the whole reason why you began doing it in the first. This is why we change workout types.

And even if you said I want to do four by four minutes all the time that I mean your choice But within that what would we have to do we'd have to change the speed sometimes We'd have to change the rest intervals sometimes do it with really short rest intervals a little slower Sometimes long rest and intervals like faster because if we don't We're going to just you know adapt or we're not going to adapt and again going back to history like even though the training was less mature and evolved.

Even people like in the 1940s and 50s, like Roger Banister, if you looked at, Banister did 10 by 400 all the time.

But if you look at his progression, what did he do?

He started in the fall at 70 seconds per 400, and then gradually got a little faster, a little faster, a little faster, a little faster till he could run them in 60.

And occasionally they throw in a different type of workout in there.

But again, if you're the guy who's optimizing everything, You shouldn't be training like Roger Bannister did in the 1950s.

You should be training like we do in the 2020s.

So, I think, again, that's just my little track running fault there.

But I think on the longevity piece here, here's what I think.

I think it's worthy to explore.

Yeah, to your point of like, we need to be more explorers.

He's certainly that.

And it's cool and fun to see him doing something so audacious, it's like, like we kind of need somebody like that who's out there like trying all of these things and willing to like have people make fun of him in the public sphere.

Is he doing everything absolutely the way that he should be?

Maybe not, maybe, you know, like everybody's got an opinion.

You certainly have legitimacy to weigh in on the fitness piece of it all.

Exactly and I think I have no fault for him doing that exploration.

I think, again, I'll tie it to running.

Arthur Lidier revolutionized training by experimenting on himself.

He was a milkman who decided, you know what, I'm going to try and run 200 miles a week and see what happens.

It was a little too much so he dialed it back, but he experimented on himself.

And that's what led to training principles being revolutionized and running.

It wasn't like some scientists to like figure this out.

It was a milkman. I think that there is a degree of, we need explorers experimenting.

I think where I struggle with is we have to separate out what an experiment is on the individual from then validating that with good science.

Well, and on top of that, there's a difference between I'm exploring this thing and I'll tell you what I find versus do as I do.

And I think the human mind, like, it just wants to be told what to do.

And these things are delivered in kind of these reductive pieces that aren't necessarily as helpful as they appear to be.

I mean, in terms of like, like interval training, four by four, whatever it is, like this goes back.

I mean, when I, in the seventies, when I was a kid swimming, like all you do as a competitive swimmer is intervals, right?

And that can mean a million different things.

So sometimes it's, you know 10 times 100 on very short rest. and the goal is to make each one of those exactly the same time.

So that you're completing it, at the same pace that you initiated it.

Other times a little more rest and you want each successive interval to be faster than the one proceeded at.

It's called a descending set.

Sometimes you do pyramids where you build up and you come back down, or sometimes you take an extreme amount of rest and then you do fewer intervals and you're trying to just absolutely go all out on every single one and see if you can be consistent to the end.

So the point being, like, to say you should do intervals is sort of a meaningless concept, other than that, you know, you're taking a compressed time and distance and trying to extract some kind of, you know, fitness game out of that.

But within that, there's a million variations and ways to kind of, you know, improve around the edges of your performance.

And this is my one of my biggest complaints is we don't understand the nuance of what you're just talking about that in the health in social media world because to your point, you know, there was a guy in the 1950s and 60s named Mahali Agmai who coached a bunch of Americans to World Records and He lived in Los Angeles.

And because of that They did all intervals like swimmers, very little easy running and people look at that and they're like, oh my gosh, you know, the 1964 Olympic gold medalist, Bob Schul, who he coached, he did all intervals, we should copy him.

He didn't do any aerobic, your easy stuff, but if you look at how the intervals were set, right?

What was it? It was like hundreds and 200s with like laser short rest that wasn't that fast. So we was building that zone to aerobics.

Yeah, you're basically built, you're at the, you're trying to be at the highest or outermost edge of your zone, too, the entire time, but you're not gonna be able to complete the set if you exceed that threshold.

Bingo! And that's it.

So I think like that, nuance is lost. And I think, you know, again, coming back to Rhonda Pratrik, I think she does great work, but I think her downfall is that when it comes to high -intensity interval training is she looks at the science, which is good, But you have to understand the, I'll just call it the coaching artistry of what you're just talking about there where there's a million ways to do these intervals and how we, you know, twist and turn the variables will impact the adaptation we have. And I get we can't tell everyone how to complicate and like twist all the variables.

But my job as a coach is to say like, hey, when we say high intensity interval training, I'll tell you, I looked it up about a month ago to see what the science said on it.

It said essentially defining high intensity interval training was anything from, I think it was, like, 20 seconds to, you know, fifteen minute intervals at varying intensities.

And when I saw that definition, I'm like, I can do something that puts someone in the Hurt locker, you know, in full of lactate and acid with 15, 20 second intervals off like three, you know, three intervals, we'll just go all out and you'll be done.

And on the ground puking.

And I can do 15 minute intervals completely aerobically.

Yeah. And we'll be fine.

We would do in Christmas training, like the most intense training season of the year for swimming, we do every year we do 10 times 1000 long course meters.

10 ,000 meters of swimming.

These like, takes you like, you know, three hours or whatever, like a couple hours to do this, you know?

Like, that's an interval set.

It's exactly, and I think this is where again, I just wish, my call is like, you know, and I'm a scientist at heart, but like the research is good, but I just wish people would take the time on the health and fitness and longevity space to understand some of the history of training whether it's be and coaching whether it's swimming running cycling like it all get you to the same spot in terms of like understanding that because I think there's so much data and understanding there that it gets lost and I think you see that with Brian Johnson for example because what does he do he sees the Norwegian method

the 4x4 minutes or whoever he's working with and he says because, oh, this has a research study, this must be the best, I'm gonna do this.

Where if you went down to your high school cross -country coach, and they were decent, they could write you a better program because they understand the interval training, or the same with the swim coach at the high school, because they had to understand and see, and test, hmm, if I do this, this, and this, do my athletes improve and get better, and you understand that along with your knowledge and history.

All right. So Brian give Steve a call.

He's waiting for he's waiting for your call Here's the deal is I hate on or I throw things out on social media a lot on You know whether it's longevity or health what have you but I'm doing that in my areas as we talked about Because I have the expertise and hopefully knowledge to pass along and while I might you know, give some people some shit I really do want them to like understand and update and if anybody ever comes to me and I've had people do this and say Hey, let me understand this this more, you know influencer Podcast or whatever.

I will give them free stuff.

I will say here's let's talk Here's all my resources for coaching like let's understand this because I think at the end of the day well, it's fun.

It's kind of fun. And you get addicted to like, you know, calling people out on things.

The goal is better information.

And if you have a large platform and you're talking to health fitness, especially in endurance world, I want you conveying information that's kind of help people.

And that's what I'm about and sorry if I get on you every once in a while, but like, that's the goal.

I love the passion.

I love the energy. All right.

Well, let's kind of end this with some concluding thoughts or synthesis of kind of what we've covered today in the context of winning the inside game, which is really winning the inside game is about the inside job, right?

So what do you wanna leave people with in terms of like how they should think about why this is important and kind of how to go about it?

Are societies like pull towards success and achievement is A, making a lot of people miserable.

We can see this on U Sports, the dropout rate, I think it's like 70 % of kids quit sports by 13.

We can see it in academics, if you look at the pressure and stress around everything from elementary to high school, you know, teaching to the tests, it makes teachers miserable, it makes kids miserable and it hurts our performance as well as if you look at it.

And then if you look at the workplace or entrepreneur or what have you, as we've talked about, the sole zero sum game of win or lose, defining success externally causes us to perform worse, not fulfill our potential and make us miserable.

And my call in this book is simple.

I'm not telling you, forget about achievements.

I have achievements and goals that I wanna get as well as anybody else.

But what I'm telling you is we need to rebalance that equation.

And part of that means we need to redefine success, not having our entire identity tied to it but diversifying our kind of sources of meaning, diversifying our definition of success and move more towards that exploratory nature where we realize that like myself and I had to, the fact that my mile best ends with 401 instead of three -something, might've heard in the moment, but what mattered more is that journey that I went on to understand and explore my limits even if I didn't find the outer bounds of it because that led to basically everything else that I've gotten to explore and do.

Yeah, if you would have achieved that goal and run 359 at some point, we wouldn't be sitting here.

You would not be writing books.

Who knows what you would be doing, but I really don't think any of these books or any of the stuff that you've done would have occurred because it's that splinter that basically is, you know, the generative energy behind all of this exploration that you've done.

It was the worst thing to happen in the moment, but the best thing in my life because you're spot on.

I wouldn't, I wouldn't have gone on that exploration.

So like, that's what in the research bears this out in a number of ways away from sport is like, sometimes those moments that hit us the hardest are the path opening up for us to explore somewhere new where we never thought we'd go down.

Because if you asked, you know, teenage Steve, or 20 something year old Steve, if he'd be writing a book about redefining success and talking about Eastern and Western religions and like, you know, academic studies and stuff, he'd be like who were you talking about?

Steve only cares about running.

And running a fast mile, that's all that matters.

So again, sometimes that's the universe saying like hey, get exploring.

Yeah, nobody who's in the midst of, you know, But of dealing with a big failure wants to hear that.

But time and time again, it's proven true.

Sometimes the timeline has to be pretty long for that to kind of bear fruit.

But I see it all the time.

These things that we perceive in the moment to be cataclysmic or just setbacks, ultimately are things we can, we if we have the resources and the wherewithal are the building blocks for something better.

You know, you could be that guy, maybe you even went on and won the gold medal in the 1500 meters or something like that, but then who are you?

Are you the guy who's just dining out on that for the rest of your life?

Yeah. You know, who knows, right?

But I don't know, you seem like you're pretty happy doing what you're doing right now.

And what you're doing, I'm sure gives you that sense of meaning and purpose because it is an act of service to other people.

I appreciate that, so I'm just gonna remind myself that Rich Roll tells me it's all right that I read 401.

We're all good. We thank you for running 401, Steve.

And we then, of course, thank you for all the books that you've contributed as a result of that deep wound that you're still trying to heal within yourself.

The product of which is win the inside game, which is great book, congrats on that.

And everybody can get it everywhere.

Steve is gonna go home now because his wife is pregnant and is gonna be having a child, by the time we put this up, you will have a new baby boy or girl, so two girls, wow.

That's me too, dad.

I'm gonna have to come for you for some tips.

I've been through it all, well, the youngest is now 16 so I've seen it all my friend and I will happily take your call.

Thanks, man. And for people who wanna learn more about you, maybe just leave us with like all the places and all the things.

Yeah, on all social media Instagram, Twitter, all variations at Steve Magnus, my website stevemagnes .com, and then I've got a newsletter along with good friend and colleague Brad Stolberg.

Friend of the pod. Yep, called the growth equation newsletter, can find it if you Google it.

Excellent, man. Thank you, buddy.

Thanks a lot. Peace.

So thanks. That's it for today.

Thank you for listening.

I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation.

To learn more about today's guests, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll .com, where you can find the entire podcast archive, my books, Finding Ultra, Boising Change, and The Plant Power Way, as well as The Plant Power Meal Planner at meals .richroll .com.

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class.

[Winning the Inner Game: Steve Magness on Overcoming the Rut of Competence and Embracing Sustainable Growth]-[Win The Inside Game: High Performance Psychology, Busting Fitness Myths, & Getting Unstuck With Elite Coach Steve Magness]

📋 Summary

Win the Inside Game: Redefining Success and Sustainable Growth

The Rut of Competence and the Fear of Exploration

Moving from Performance to Quest

Practical Steps to Break Free

Conclusion

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript