Exploring Peak Health and Fitness, with Mark Sisson

In this episode, we discuss:

• Mark’s journey from runner to fitness advocate
• The case against chronic cardio
• Footwear, biomechanics, and the importance of sensory input
• How to take a balanced approach to running
• Using a smarter strategy to optimize fitness
• The power of all-day movement

  Show notes:

Hey everybody. Chris Kresser here, welcome to another episode of Revolution Health Radio. This week I’m really happy to welcome back Mark Sisson as my guest. Mark is a legend in the ancestral health community. I’m sure most of you listening to this podcast know of Mark. He’s been an inspiration for many, including me. One of the first people I came across when I first started getting into the primal and paleo lifestyle. He’s the author of a number of best selling books, The Primal Blueprint and The Keto Reset. He is a former marathon runner and elite Hawaii Ironman triathlete and an amazing entrepreneur. He founded Primal Kitchen. I’m sure many of you use their products, as I do. And more recently, he founded Peluva, a five-toe, minimalist shoe company. And Mark has a new book out called Born to Walk, and that’s what we’re going to talk about today. Mark has been an advocate of walking and what we might call non-exercise physical activity for many, many years. He’s been critical of the chronic cardio ideology and the idea that we should be doing things that raise our heart rate into the zone that doesn’t really provide the benefits of sprinting or more intense activity, but isn’t low enough to lead to meaningful fat burning. We talk a lot about some of the downsides of running, including increased risk of injury, [and] some of the upsides of walking. We also discuss what recent research says about the benefits of walking for metabolic and cardiovascular health, the importance of proper footwear, biomechanics and having enough sensory input for our feet, the problem with most running shoes, and a whole bunch of related topics on how we can optimize our physical fitness, not only for health, but also for pleasure and fun and joy in life, which I think is really important and often not discussed enough. As usual when I talk to Mark, I really enjoyed this conversation. I think it’s got a lot of pearls of wisdom in it that you can hopefully take back to your own life and [use] to enjoy movement even more and be more consistent with it in your life, which will mean better health and more longevity. Let’s dive in.

Chris Kresser:  Mark, so good to have you on the show. It’s been too long.

Mark Sisson:  It’s been a long time, Chris. Great to see you again.

Chris Kresser:  I think we both moved since we last talked. We were part of the California exodus. I think you’re in Miami, [and] I’m in Bend, Oregon now.

Mark Sisson:  Yes. I’ve been in Miami for almost seven years now.

Chris Kresser:  We’ve talked since then for sure, because I was in Park City for a while [and] then we moved here. You had a three-day retirement, from what I understand, that was followed by a lot of interesting activities that we were just chatting about before the show.

Mark Sisson:  Yeah, it’s been great. One door closes and two doors open, right? After I sold Primal Kitchen, I tried to be retired for a little bit. [It] didn’t work, so [I] dedicated my attention to fixing a problem that I’d seen that had plagued me for a long time with footwear. I started this minimalist shoe company called Peluva with my son. That’s been a blast. We’re having a great time doing that and we’re getting a lot of great traction with the product. Then, most recently, [I] wrote a book called Born to Walk, which just came out the other day and is already doing quite well in terms of sales. But almost more importantly, the people that I respect who have read the book and are going, “Oh my God, this is great, Mark. Somebody needed to say this. Somebody needed to jump on the bandwagon and reiterate that walking is the single best thing a human being can do.” So yeah, I’ve been busy.

Chris Kresser:  Let’s dive into that. For those younger folks who might not be familiar, the title [is a] play on a previous book called Born to Run. You and I have known each other for a long time, and you’ve been beating this drum for a very long time. A lot of the movement practices that you advocated early on were based more around strength training and sprinting and more functional kinds of movement, rather than steady state cardio. I remember some of your early, early articles about steady state cardio back at a time where everybody accepted that was the thing you should be doing. And I just remember some of the comments on that article, a lot of flack. So take us back, because you were a runner. That was your background. So how did you come to this realization?

Mark Sisson:  Well I was a good runner. I qualified for the Olympic trials in 1980 [and the] US Marathon trials. [I] finished fifth in the US National Championship marathon in 1980, won a couple of marathons over my career, and was a good 2:20 marathoner. My personal record is 2:18. That was how I identified– as a runner– through my teens and early 20s, until I got injured. And it was getting injured and getting burnt out, getting beat up, being at the effect of the diet that we all thought was necessary in order to put those miles in… all these things sort of jumped on me and forced me, A, to retire and, B, to kind of redirect my focus at how I [could] be strong and fit and healthy and lean without all of the struggling and suffering and sweating and groaning and sacrifice and all the negative things that we sort of assume we have to do in order to be fit. So that’s what got me down this path of creating The Primal Blueprint. I had a degree in Biology from Williams College, I was a pre-med student, I was very interested in evolution. So much of my early writing was informed by evolutionary biology and modern genetic science, which was looking at what happens to our bodies when we change a behavior or a way of eating. What are the effects at the genetic level, at the level of gene expression? What are these epigenetic factors that are causing us to either gain weight, become sick, and have aches and pains and inflammation the rest of our lives, versus those of us who build muscle, maintain flexibility, never get sick, [and] burn off body fat with ease and grace. What are the differences? It’s these hidden genetic switches that we all have that I’ve spent my life, and I know you have too, trying to figure out what those secrets [are] and how we incorporate those into our lives.

Looking back on my career as an endurance athlete, and all of the years I spent not having fun, every workout was like an exercise in pain management. Or at the very least, managing what I call discomfort. And it just didn’t seem that was something that would fit the human experience in a way that made life worth living and getting up every day. So in re-examining the amount of time I spent beating myself up on the roads, first as a runner and then as a triathlete, I looked at the amount of damage that we’re doing to our hearts. And so my first real, I think, informative piece that I wrote on the internet, it was for Art De Vany. Before I even had Mark’s Daily Apple, I wrote a guest post for Art De Vany that was called “A Case Against Chronic Cardio.” Art and I basically coined this phrase “chronic cardio,” which described this heart rate that so many people train at which is too high to be generating sort of a fast fat metabolism, too high to be improving capillary perfusion and building an aerobic base, but too low to be pushing the envelope of VO2 max and anaerobic threshold and things like that. It’s what we call the no man’s land of training, where you’re out there and it feels like you’re really working, right? You’re sweating and you’re groaning and you’re grunting, and you do your 45-minute run, and you come back and you’re exhausted, and you sit on the chair or the sofa, and you feel like it was a really valuable workout. But all you did was practice hurting. You didn’t improve any of the parameters that we would lay down if we were going to establish a plan of action to get from point A to point B in terms of improving performance.

So what happens as a result of this is, over time, people don’t get much faster in their training. People enter this sort of arena in the pursuit of losing weight, because a lot of people start running because they think it’s a great weight loss strategy. It’s not. So they get frustrated. Running has the highest rate of injury of any activity, even more than the NFL or Jiu Jitsu. [Something] like 50 percent of all runners get injured every year. At [some] point in time every runner in the world is injured. Twenty-five percent of runners are injured right now. So what are the benefits of running? Yeah, it’s better than sitting around on the sofa and eating pies and cakes all day, but there are probably 50 other things that we could be doing that are much better for us in terms of getting us down this path to improved health, improved immunity, increased longevity, [and] decreased risk for all of these other diseases of lifestyle. So the idea for the book came out of this notion that runners are not losing weight. Look, two percent of the population is probably built to run- ectomorphs with great lung capacity, with high genetic predisposed VO2 max, and a high pain tolerance. The rest of us should probably be walking a lot more and running a lot less. So that’s really what prompted this book, Born to Walk.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah. And what a relief for the 98 percent of people who don’t fit into that category, right? Which I am one [of]. I’ve never liked running. I love surfing, skiing, and mountain biking.

Mark Sisson:  You like to play.

Chris Kresser:  I like to play and have fun, and do it outdoors, preferably. And if there’s a little bit of risk involved, I tend to like that too, but that’s a whole other topic. But I just could never get behind the idea of just jogging for a long time.

Born to Walk: The Case Against Chronic Cardio

Mark Sisson:  Well, you brought up the book [and] that the title was sort of tongue-in-cheek based on a very great book written by Christopher McDougal, [which] came out in, I think, 2010 called Born to Run. His hypothesis was that humans evolved as persistence hunters. We were able to track down a beast and stick a spear in it and eat the meat. And that high density, quality nutrition is what allowed our brains to get bigger and allowed us to ascend the food chain and become apex predators. But it was all sort of predicated on this notion that we were born to run. But if you look at persistence hunters, they don’t run seven-minute miles chasing down a mastodon or a gazelle. They jog a little bit, they hide, they crouch, they sniff, they wait, they run again, they sprint, and they might track an animal for two hours while the animal’s trying to get away, but they do it using their brains more than they’re using their VO2 max. And as a result of all of this tracking and this ability to create a tool that can stab the animal and track it down and spear it and kill it, and then bring it back to camp and eat it, it was assumed that we’re all designed to run. And my idea is, yeah, we’re born to be able to run once in a while, but not daily and certainly not metronomically at [a] seven or eight or nine or 10-minute mile pace. We’re born to be able to run as a result of all the walking that our ancestors did. I mean, that’s all they did was walk. That’s how we populated the face of this planet. We didn’t jog across the Bering Straits and come down into the Americas that way. Over time, we walked thousands of steps a day. In fact, it was antithetical for most of human history to expend calories running when you could walk much more conveniently and much more in alignment with your biomechanics, [and] be able to not get injured, because almost nobody gets injured walking. It is like, if you get injured running, how do you recover from your injury? You walk, right?

So, my thesis here is that we are born to walk. We should walk. It’s the quintessential human movement. As a result of all the walking that we do, we are also born to sprint. Look, our ancestors did sprint once in a while. They sprinted away from something that was going to kill them, or they sprinted towards something they were going to do the final spear jab in, or whatever it was. And they lifted heavy things. They didn’t go to the gym, but they lifted heavy things. They lifted logs and stones. They built structures. They climbed trees. They carried carcasses back to camp. They carried babies with them. They lifted heavy things. The combination of low level aerobic activity all day long, this is what we would call Zone One and Zone Two now. A little bit of sprinting once in a while, not a lot, [but] once in a while, and then lifting heavy things, which I would incorporate now into the modern lifestyle as [going] to the gym twice a week and [lifting] weights. The combination of all of those component parts would let you be able now to go out, and if you did it right, run six miles at a pretty decent clip. So you don’t have to run every day to call yourself a runner. What I’m saying is, I’m giving runners permission to walk a lot, lift weights, [and] sprint once in a while. I’m giving people who’ve never even considered walking because they thought, “Oh, I can’t burn calories walking because I read all this stuff about running and I don’t run. I don’t like to run. I can’t run because of my injuries, so I’m screwed, because I have no way to move that’s legitimate.” And I’m telling you no, walking is the most legitimate form of human movement.

It’s not about calories. You know as well as I do, and more than most, that body composition happens as a result of diet. 80 percent, maybe 85, maybe 90 percent of your body composition [and] your ability to become metabolically flexible and burn off your own stored body fat doesn’t happen through exercise. It happens through diet. If you orchestrate your diet the appropriate way, you burn fat all day long, and then you burn fat while you’re walking. And you burn fat at some point as you get better and better at walking and build a stronger aerobic base and decide maybe you want to run a little bit. If you run with good form and keep your running within a reasonable heart rate, yes, you’ll burn fat doing that. So there’s a much kinder, gentler, thoughtful, mindful way to become supremely fit without having to put on those thick, crappy running shoes and go out and pound the pavement every day.

Chris Kresser:  I love that. And the benefit of that, among many others, is like you said- most people don’t enjoy doing that, and that [often] means they’ll fall off the wagon and stop doing anything at all if running is their main form of exercise and they don’t have a backup or they get injured. As you said, it’s so common. I know so many people who are runners who have multiple musculoskeletal issues, back problems, shoulder problems, feet, knees, ankle, etc. There’s just so many other options and ways to move your body that I think most people would enjoy more.

Before we move on, I want to ask you, [since] I think we’re both really interested in evolutionary lens and perspective, when you mentioned genetic and epigenetic differences between walking and running, for example, just to help people get their head around this, what does running trigger in the body as a sort of epigenetic or adaptive response versus walking?

Footwear, Biomechanics, and the Importance of Sensory Input

Mark Sisson:  The body, when we run and we’re not trained (which is most of us, untrained) and we run with bad form, when we run with shoes that encourage heel striking and bad form, when we are slightly overweight or grossly overweight and try to run, [or] when we run at a heart rate that is too high to be burning fat, the body taps into its glycogen stores. And glycogen is a great fuel, but if we deplete glycogen, which most people do every workout, the brain goes into a bit of a panic and says, first of all, this thing that we’re doing which we’re not trained to do, is stressful. It’s a hormetic stressor, and it’s a chronic stressor if we do it every day. So every day, I go out and run and, again, I feel [like it’s] valuable. I’m sweating, I’m hot, I’m tired, I’m beat up, [so] it must be good for me. Well, no, the body’s secreting cortisol, which is a stress hormone, as a result of this unnatural activity that we’re doing. By the way, it’s only made even remotely palatable by the fact that we wear thick, cushioned shoes that negate all of the important haptic input that our feet need to tell us to stop running, or at least tell us to run with good form. It’s the shoes that allow this, and then it’s the unlimited supply of carbohydrates that lets us carbo load every day to be able to go do it again the next day and the next day and the next day.

Before this unlimited supply of carbs and before these thick cushion shoes, if people ran at all, they ran once in a while, and only [out] of necessity. They would never choose to run unless they had to, because it was stressful, because it depleted muscle glycogen, and it made you hungry. And a thousand years ago, or 10,000 years ago, or a million years ago, if calories are scarce, that’s a life threatening situation. So all of these responses that we incur from running today with bad form, with thick shoes, with a high carb diet, create a stress response that over time builds up and manifests itself either as not only not losing weight, but in some cases, gaining weight. In some cases, your weight remains the same. But because running is catabolic [and] tears muscle tissue down, over time if your weight stays the same, your body fat increases but your muscle mass decreases, even though your weight stayed the same. It’s a great irony of this whole thing. People who are trying to lose weight running actually become fatter as a result of running in many cases, as opposed to losing the weight.

So it’s a whole series of bad events happening to the body because your cushioned, cloudy shoes allowed you to bypass this important information in which your kinetic chain would be organized. I mean, we have a whole section in the book on [how] our ancestors ran barefoot. If they ran, they ran barefoot. They didn’t wear shoes until a few thousand years ago. The feet have all of these important tens of thousands of nerve receptors on the bottoms of the feet that by the time you weight that front foot, by the time you actually step, the brain already has all the information. It knows on exactly how to bend the arch, how to articulate the toes, maybe how to roll the ankle out a little bit because the rock you’re stepping on is uneven, or the ground is uneven. And by rolling your ankle a little bit, which it’s supposed to do, you prevent the knee from tweaking sideways, which it’s not supposed to do. This information tells your knee exactly how much to bend to absorb some of the weight of the footfall, or how much to rotate the hip. Whether you’re walking or jumping or sprinting or dancing or throwing a spear or hitting a golf ball or a baseball, your feet are informing the brain of exactly how to organize your kinetic chain so that all of these joints, these bones, these ligaments, these tendons, this cartilage, everything from the bottom of the feet up through the neck, they’re orchestrated in a biomechanical way that best suits your particular body.

Everybody’s born with a perfect kinetic chain. Whether you’re knock kneed, duck footed, flat footed, no arch, big arch, wide hip, narrow, whatever it is, everybody’s got a perfect kinetic chain, provided your brain gets the information it needs on how your kinetic chain is best organized to take that step. That’s all based on being barefoot. Now you put a thick shoe with a cushion underneath it, none of that input is there. Your foot has no idea what it’s stepping on, whether it’s stepping in a hole, a ditch, a rock, whatever. It just all feels the same. It’s like your feet are encased. Your big toe is now squished over against the other toes. Your big toe is probably the most important part of your foot, [and] normally when you’re walking, you plant the heel [and] roll off the big toe. That’s how your gait starts. [And] that gets compromised because it’s all scrunched over. Now you’re doing this thousands of times a day as a runner and your body is being tricked, thinking, “These thick cushions that I’m running on, they feel like pillows, I must not be hurting myself at all.” Well, because you’re not running with good form, because you’re heel striking, or because you’re overweight, or whatever series of things that are happening, you get injured, because it just pushes all of that negated information. Now the ankle has to kind of roll a little bit [and] the brain says I don’t know whether we bend the knee outward or inward, or I don’t know how much. And so you’ve lost all of that important information that the body needs on how to take a perfect step or a perfect running gait or a perfect sprint. An injury is your body’s way of telling you you’re doing it wrong. Can you imagine if our ancestors, in pursuit of food and just living their lives, got injured at that kind of rate? We wouldn’t be here.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, for sure. And it’s true, I mean, I love this that we’re talking about this, that in Chinese medicine and martial arts there’s a saying that you die from your feet up. And that’s based on this idea that you’re talking about, where the feet are the platform that supports all movement that we do. And if we lose sensitivity there, if we don’t have the full range of input that tells us how to organize our skeleton above the feet, then there’s so many problems that can ensue from that because the feet are really the start of the whole kinetic chain. I see so many people, like when I was treating patients, and especially as they age, with so much lack of awareness of their feet. And then that translates into injuries, it translates into less mobility, less strength, and less ability to age gracefully and enjoy their life. I think this is a huge issue that is not really talked about very often.

Mark Sisson:  When you stop moving, you start dying. We are built to move. Our bodies, our genetic recipe, expects us to move. First of all, we’re bipedal. How is it that we’re able to stand up on two legs? We’re not a tripod. We don’t have four legs. So built into our mechanism is [that] we have to move a lot just to regain and maintain balance. Our immune system depends on us moving a lot. Our digestion depends on us moving a lot. Certainly, the lymphatic system, which doesn’t have a pump like a heart of its own, depends on movement for us to optimize the lymphatic system. All of these different systems in the body expect us to be moving. And as you said, the feet are our connection with the universe. It’s what connects us to the ground. It’s the point of contact we have with the world. And if we can’t feel that point of contact, if it’s become cut off either as a result of crappy shoes, or worse, a neuroma or a diabetic lack of circulation, that’s the beginning of a huge slippery slope downhill.

The more we can recognize that foot health, and I’ve said this for the last two years, foot health is the new sleep, right? It’s like people have just been assuming the feet are there, I guess. I guess they’re there, I don’t know. I don’t feel that much. We have this shoe company which has five toed shoes, [and] the number of people who try the shoes on for the first time, it takes them 10 minutes to get the shoes on because they have no awareness of where their toes are, of what their toes do. And so with this shoe company, we say if your feet slide right into these shoes, you want these shoes. If your feet don’t slide right into these shoes, you need these shoes.

A Balanced Approach to Running

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, [that] makes sense. I know that there are some people out there listening to this who are runners and enjoy running, and one thing I hear a lot about is, I’ll just take my brother, for example- he’s not running now because of injuries, but in the past he really felt like it was the best stress relief for him. So is there an amount of running that you feel is okay, within this context of a more diversified movement program?  I imagine it depends on how they’re running, what the approach is, etc.

Mark Sisson:  Absolutely. I would say, first off, it depends on your genetics. Like, are you an ectomorph with good lung capacity?

Chris Kresser:  Can you break that down for people who aren’t familiar with that term? What an ectomorph is?

Mark Sisson:  Ectomorphs tend to be skinny people. Ectomorph, mesomorph, endomorph. Endomorphs tend to be larger, overweight, big boned. Mesomorphs put on muscle pretty easily. They’re the middle of the scale. Ectomorphs are thin. They’re the ones who typically, at least historically up until about 50 years ago, and I was one, self-select to be a runner. Because before the running boom took off, and the first 80 pages of Born to Walk describe the running boom and how it came to be and how it was like this perfect storm and misalignment of pseudoscience and anthropological studies that were sort of corralled into one area, and Phil Knight and Bill Bowerman developing a thick shoe so the really good runners, like some of the best runners in the world, could put in more miles. But then that thick shoe became the choice for all of the overweight runners who wanted to start running [but] who couldn’t run until the thick shoe existed because it was just too painful to their feet. So there’s all of these things that came about. But most people who self-select to be runners, and I was one, [do] it because [they’re] good at it. I didn’t particularly enjoy it, but I enjoyed the feeling of being a high performance beast. I enjoyed the feeling. It’s almost like hand to hand combat, I guess. You win a race and it’s a pretty heady feeling. And I’m suggesting [to] people who are into that space and who are competitive and want to run, go ahead and do that. I wrote a book 10 years ago called Primal Endurance, and it looked at how you train for endurance without killing yourself, without being beat up. But first of all, a lot of people who say they love to run don’t love to run. They love to tell you that they run, and they love to have finished running, and they love the concept of having run already. But while they’re running, they’re the ones with the headphones on and Metallica playing, and they’re trying to disassociate with all of the discomfort going on there.

Ditch chronic cardio & embrace the power of walking for better health & longevity. This new episode of Revolution Health Radio with Mark Sisson dives deep into the benefits of walking & why it’s our natural movement. #BornToWalk #Health #Fitness #ChrisKresser

Mark Sisson:  So what do you tell people who want to run? First of all, I’d say if I could give you a training strategy where you did a lot of Zone Two activity, some of which was walking, some of which was hiking, some which was rucking with weights on [so] your feet got stronger, your kinetic chain got reorganized so you didn’t get injured, and then you ran sprints once a week and you did it with intention, and I can show you how to run sprints in a way that reinforces, strengthens, realigns your feet, makes them more mobile [and] more resilient. Then if you say, “Okay, once or twice a week, I want to go out and run a time trial or a tempo run,” go for it. I would say that I would incorporate that into my routine if I thought I wanted to be competent across a lot of different categories. I want to be strong in the gym and lifting weights. I want to have a good VO2 max. I want to have good power and strength. I want to be able to play as many different games or sports like skiing, snowboarding, stand up paddling, pickleball or paddle. I mean, ultimate frisbee is my sport. I’m all about ultimate frisbee and much of the work I do in the gym and much of the training I do, whether it’s a lot of walking or a little bit of sprinting, is contemplated to make my ultimate frisbee experience not just more enjoyable but more effective. If you want to call yourself a runner, it doesn’t mean that you’re running six days a week metronomically banging out the same sort of per mile pace without improving over years. And this is what I see, Chris, I see people who do marathons. And again, if you want to do a marathon, go for it. But if you’re a person who’s doing a 3:40 marathon four times a year, and you haven’t improved, my question is going to be, what is your goal? Because if you’re not improving, first of all, you’re doing it wrong. Second of all, you’re probably not a runner. And third, now you’re just beating yourself up.

Now, if you want to have a wall full of finisher’s metals, that’s fine. But if you tell me, “Look, Mark, I want to improve in my strength. I want to improve in my mobility, my resilience. I want to prove my VO2 max. I want to get faster,” then just going out and running garbage miles every day thinking that it’s somehow a meditative event for you, it’s not hacking it. It’s not working. Like I said, there’s 50 different things you can do that are better [and] more efficient than that. If it was your brother, who said he likes the meditative aspect of running, dude, the meditative aspect of walking is double that of running. If you’re a conscious walker or hiker, that form of meditation can’t [be exceeded by] running. And I’ve done both. I mean, I’m the guy who went out for 20-mile runs alone for years. I was in my head and it was meditative. And it was scary. There were times when I [was] running the streets of Palo Alto and Menlo Park, and I’m like, “Oh my God, where did the last 10 miles go? How did I get through 12 street crossings without getting killed?” Because I don’t remember any of it. But walking is very meditative. People who now have read the book and are taking this up are going, “Look, I’m doing a lot of my good thinking when I’m walking, because I’m actually out in nature and I’m not necessarily having to wear headphones and [listen to] music to cancel out all of the discomfort that my body is feeling.”

Optimizing Fitness with a Smarter Strategy

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, I completely agree. And I think there’s another piece of this that we touched on briefly, which is having fun. I know you and I both have written in our books about the importance of having fun. That’s our birthright as human beings. It raises endorphin levels. In and of itself, it’s valuable to have fun, but I think from a perspective of staying active and maintaining a movement practice throughout our whole lives, that’s critical for most people. Because if you look at the average person who starts an exercise program where the main goal is just exercise and not having fun, so many people are not going to stick with that. Perhaps the majority of people. Whereas if you’re playing ultimate frisbee or surfing or skiing or playing pickleball or doing something like that, that you enjoy and that you’re also trying to get better at, it’s so much more dynamic and I think people are so much more likely to stick with that throughout their life.

Mark Sisson:  I think we went through a couple of decades where people felt like no pain, no gain. They had to go through this rite of passage five or six days a week where they beat themselves up. Whether it was women doing cardio classes, high intensity dance classes, or whether it was people doing spin classes. And Johnny G is a friend of mine. I knew him before he started spinning. And the original spin class was like once a week, go do it. But then I would see people doing two days of spin classes and [then] doing them five days a week, all out. And that’s not how it works. I see the same thing with Orange Theory or Barry’s Boot Camp. Look, these are great programs, but I don’t think it’s appropriate to do them every day. The idea behind a training strategy is to build a base, which means a lot of low level stuff. In my life and in my book, we talk about [how] 80 to 85 percent of your training time should be done at Zone Two or less. That’s how you build an aerobic base. That’s if you’re walking and walking in minimalist footwear or barefoot on the beach or whatever. But if you’re consciously walking, you’re reinforcing this strong kinetic chain, which is only inuring to your ability to be a better sprinter and a better runner when the time comes. But 85 percent of the time is building a base at Zone Two or below. And then a tiny fragment of it is the high level stuff done at max heart rate, which would be the intervals that we do anywhere from 10 seconds to 45 seconds, all out with a one to two-minute rest. Do it again, repeat. Rinse and repeat. Do eight of those in a session, and if you do those appropriately, you shouldn’t be able to do them again for several days.

What’s lost in a lot of these high intensity HIIT programs [is] people [are] beating themselves up, but if they’re able to do it every day, then they’re not doing it well enough on any given day to get the benefits of the workout. Because the workout only is valuable if you do hard work and it’s more than your body’s used to and then you recover from it. So you got rest, you got a little bit of stretching, and you’ve got nutrition, right? Those are the things that allow those different systems, whether it’s the aerobic system, whether it’s muscle strength, whatever it is, to get better over time. If all you do is just every day practice hurting yourself but never go to the edge, A, you don’t get the benefits, B, you beat yourself up, C, you get injured, D, you get burned out, and ultimately you have a bad experience.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah it’s the no man’s land that you mentioned earlier. It’s neither here nor there. You’re not getting any of the benefits and you’re increasing all of the downsides and the risks.

Mark Sisson: If you had to distill it to the essence, that is what it is with most people who run. They don’t get the benefits because they’re continually beating themselves up every day in the black hole of training, the black hole of this no man’s land. You’d be better off separating the workouts and doing a lot of low end stuff and then a little bit of high end stuff, and then once in a while do your five mile run and put a stopwatch on yourself and see how you do. But do it with good form, because that’s the other aspect of this is. If you don’t have good form you will break down. Even if you’re well trained, [if] you don’t have good form, you court injury as a metronomic runner.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah. Let’s make this a little more real for people in terms of, like, a week’s worth of programming. If somebody’s mixing Zone One, Zone Two, walking, gentle movement like that with some strength training, lifting heavy stuff, and then maybe some higher intensity activity, what might that look like in a week’s time?

Mark Sisson:  Start with finding every possible way that you can move throughout the day. For most people, that’s walking. It’s walking in the morning before you go to work, it’s parking a half mile or a mile away from school when you take the kids to school, and then everybody walks to school and then you walk back to your car alone. It’s at work [if] you have the ability to take calls while you’re pacing. Some people have a walking desk, a treadmill, or a walking pad at their desk. It’s finding a group to go on a lunch break with. You have an hour for lunch, but it only takes 15 minutes to eat your lunch, so go for a walk with friends. Take calls [and] pace around your office, pace down the hall on the phone. If you have time after work, go out and hit the road and do a walk. But bear in mind that a 45-minute walk is not more valuable than five 10-minute walks spaced throughout the day. And a case could be made that the five 10-minute walks might be more valuable because you are spreading [out] that movement that the body expects throughout the day.

One of the dangers of compartmentalizing your life because of the prioritization of work and family and everything else is you go, “Okay, my workout time is here and it’s one hour and that’s all I’m going to do.” Well, what happens as a result of that is, throughout the rest of your day, if you’ve done it well enough, your body goes, “Ah, I don’t need to go rake the leaves. I don’t need to go throw the football with my kid. I don’t need to go dancing with my partner, because I already did the workout today.” But [it’s] better to spread that workout over the course of a day. And again, don’t count calories. If you’re a device wearer and you want to count steps, go for it. But this is not about burning calories. This is about movement. The more movement you do in these zones, the Zone One and Zone Two, accumulates to the point that, over the course of a week, you’ve actually worked out without working out. You didn’t go to the gym, necessarily. I mean, you could. You could go do all of this on the treadmill, but you don’t have to go to the gym to get that base work done if, throughout the day, one of your goals is to find ways to move while you’re being productive at work, or while you’re taking care of the kids or walking the dog or doing whatever you’re doing.

Mark Sisson:  The only gym time you really need to carve out for yourself, if you want to go to a gym, is two hours a week, two weight lifting sessions a week. Separate them by at least three days. I do a three and a four-day split. And going back to what we talked about earlier, if you do your weight training appropriately, you shouldn’t be able to repeat that workout a day later or two days later. It doesn’t mean you’re going to tear yourself down. It just means that you want to give your body enough time to recover from it, so that by the time you go to the gym the next time, you’re stronger. So find two hours in the week that you can get to the gym, spaced three or four days apart. And then one day a week, it doesn’t have to conflict with the gym days, but one day a week you go, okay, I’m going to do sprints today. Now, what do sprints look like? Well, if you’re a runner, you could go to the track and do two hundreds, or you could do them on treadmill at the gym. You could do assault bike at the gym. I love the rope pull machine. There’s a couple of rope pull machines at my gym. I do one workout now that I’m recovering from a hip replacement [where] I go on the two minutes. I’ll do a 30-second pull as hard as I can, walk around the gym, catch my breath, try not to throw up, and on the next two minutes start the 30-second pull again, and do eight or 10 of those. It’s an ass-kicking workout and the time under load is only five minutes total. Ten times 30 seconds is just five minutes. But it’s an ass kicker. It’s a fat burner, it’s a VO2 max increaser, and it’s all you need to do, right? But it could be in the elliptical if you’re an elliptical person, it could be on the stationary bike. I don’t care, but find one session a week, and total time is going to be half an hour between the warm up and the cool down. That’s it.

If you find ways to move throughout the week that don’t even count on your time calendar and then two one-hour sessions in the gym, and then one 30-minute session of sprinting, that’s going to get you 80 to 85 percent of your total possible performance metric. The rest, the next 15 percent, is what takes you into the obsessive-compulsive thing where every incremental improvement is going to take more and more time away from your family, more and more struggling and suffering to get to. And the question you would ask yourself is, “Is it worth it? What’s at the end of that if I’m not going to compete?” If I’m not going to race, or if my goal is ultimately on Saturday or Sunday to get in a pickup softball game or to get in a pickup basketball game and not get injured and be able to stay on the court because our team won because I was such a hot shot with my defense. The idea here is to achieve a combination of supreme fitness, risk reduction of all typical diseases, improvement in prospects for longevity, and most importantly have fun doing the things that are fun to do.

The Power of All-Day Movement

Chris Kresser:  [I] love it. Before we finish up, I actually want to circle back [to] two things I want to highlight. [First,] what you said about it [not needing] to be 45 minutes of continuous walking to [be beneficial]. Because you and I have both shared studies over the years [looking] at people who are getting the recommended amount of exercise per week, they’re going to the gym, they’re doing that sort of thing, but then the rest of the time they’re sedentary, and they are still at elevated risk of cardiovascular disease and everything else. Whereas the biggest shift comes from when you increase what you’ve just been talking about, which scientists called non exercise physical activity, which is basically just how much you [are] moving throughout your typical day. How much are you walking? Are you standing while you’re working, taking walking meetings, [and] spending a lot of time just moving your body gardening, doing chores, etc? Going from being sedentary to doing that is a bigger change and improvement in your fitness and your health and your longevity than going from that to exercising like crazy.

Mark Sisson:  Yeah I mean, my downstairs neighbor is Dan Buettner, the Blue Zones guy. And we joke that we agree on pretty much everything except the source of protein. He’s a bean guy and I’m a beef guy. But everything else we agree on. And one of the things we agree on most is that the people who live to be 100 years old in the Blue Zones, they’re just active all day. They don’t work out. This is the irony. They don’t work out, but they live a fit life because they’re always moving. They’re gardening a lot. They’re walking to the market. They’re bringing bags home from the market. They’re carrying things. It’s low level activity spread throughout the day. And you can’t stress enough that this is valuable. Finding ways to move at a low level of activity throughout the day is quintessential to establishing an aerobic base and to reinforcing a strong kinetic chain that doesn’t come from focusing on wearing thick cushion shoes and running 45 minutes and then sitting at the desk for the rest of the day and doing nothing.

Chris Kresser:  Absolutely. And it’s worth pointing out again that those studies have shown that even taking a two-minute break for every 30 minutes that you’re sitting pretty significantly reduces the risk of metabolic and cardiovascular issues. That frequency throughout the day of movement is more important even than total duration, in some ways.

So, Mark, tell everybody where they can learn more about the book and pick up a copy, and then also your shoes, because that’s a big piece of [what] we’ve talked a lot about, the importance of being able to feel your feet against the ground and [get] that sensory input.

Mark Sisson:  I have so many people in my immediate circle of friends who have taken on walking in the last two years as I’ve been really focusing on this. Most of these people are over 60. They’re all walking six, seven, eight miles a day. I live in Miami Beach. There’s not a lot of hills here, but some of them are walking with weight vests on. Some of them are rucking. Some are speed walking, and they’re all walking in Peluvas, in my shoes. It’s a minimalist shoe. It’s got five articulated toes so you can feel everything you’re walking on. Even though it looks like a normal shoe, it’s only [a] nine millimeter stack height, so it’s less than one centimeter stack height, and it’s zero drop- the heel is not raised. Being able to walk barefoot is almost always preferable, but if you can’t walk barefoot, get some minimalist shoes. Peluva.com is the site is for the shoes. The book is called Born to Walk. We have a lot of free downloads if you buy [it] off of our site, BorntoWalkBook.com. There’s a lot of ancillary downloads, and from there you can buy from links to Barnes and Noble or Amazon or whatever your favorite bookstore is. On Instagram, I’m @MarkSissonPrimal, and I’ve been pretty prolific in posting there in the last couple of years. And I’ve always had Mark’s Daily Apple. We do a newsletter once a week there. And what else? I mean, I guess that’s it.

Chris Kresser:  Well, Mark, thanks so much for coming on. [It’s] always a pleasure to talk to you. It’s been way too long. [I’m] glad we had the chance [to catch up], and congrats on the book. I’m really excited to be able to recommend it to everybody in my community. And the shoes, they’re amazing. I’m one of those unfortunate people whose second toe is much longer than my first toe so I have trouble with the five finger shoes, but I’m hoping someday there might be enough of us to have a shoe for us.

Mark Sisson:  Yeah, we’ll get you fixed up. I’ll work on that. And thanks for having me, Chris. It was great to catch up, and you’re right, we’ve got to do it again sooner rather than later. 

Chris Kresser:  All right, Mark, take care.

Mark Sisson:  Take care.