As Good As Your Weakest Link | Dr. Shawn Baker & Alex Feinberg
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People who are good looking and speak well tend to get the inside track and unfair advantages. It's seeing who is too weak to stay healthy and overcome bad training or overcome bad guidance. I don't need to get better at working hard. I need to get better at resting so that when I'm working hard, I can actually work harder. If we have no leverage, we live at the mercy of the people who have leverage over us. They never doubled down on their strengths. They never thought, okay, how am I different from other people and how am I going to get paid for it? And you can be

bad at a lot of things that people swear you have to be adequate at i've had people lose 40 50 pounds working with me you know without even going to the gym you always have an obligation to your body even if you're not writing an actual check to your body the rent always comes due one out of five is actually going to be able to do it you can find yourself working less making more being happier having more time that you can then reinvest in other areas of your life you have a much better chance of making a second shot after you made the first shot

So focus on getting the first shot in the basket. Hey folks, it's Dr. Sean Baker here. Hey, if you or someone you love is suffering from chronic disease and you're tired of just managing symptoms with potions, pills, and procedures, I want you to check out revero.com. Our team of dedicated professionals is committed to tackling the root cause of your issue and finally getting you healthy. Hurry up though, our spaces are filling up very quickly.

Welcome today. We have with us Alex Feinberg, who has some very interesting insights and some stuff. Alex, for those that aren't familiar with you, just give us a quick overview. I think, correct me if I'm wrong, but some baseball stuff. What's your background?

Yeah, I grew up wanting to be a professional baseball player and I committed to play at Vanderbilt University in part because all the players looked very jacked and tan when I was 17 years old taking my recruiting trip to Nashville, Tennessee. And so I was very into health and fitness and training from a young age, but I never understood how to properly regulate my food consumption. I knew that I needed to eat a lot of food if I wanted to get big.

But calorie-based plans never seemed to work properly for me as far as gaining the optimal amount of muscle and not getting fat following them. I learned at Vanderbilt University that people who are good looking and speak well tend to get the inside track and unfair advantages everywhere they go in life. And so by the time my professional baseball career came to an end,

I realized that I could use what I was doing on the fitness and training and diet side to elevator pitch my way into a job at Google, despite never owning a smartphone and not really understanding technology, but understanding how to wear a suit that fits me and speak well. When I was at Google, I stumbled across a number of different fitness shortcuts that are starting to become more mainstream now, but about 10 years ago were not.

Namely that if I trained for intensity rather than pain or duration, my resting metabolic rate substantially increased. And if I paired that with a protein dominant real food diet, all of a sudden I found myself not having to count calories. In fact, I was eating probably three to 4,000 calories per day of protein dominant real food. I'm still eating carbs, probably more carbs than definitely you eat and some of the viewing audience.

But definitely being mindful of having meat be the largest portion of food on my plate. And when I combined the protein dominant real food diet with a high rest, high intensity training plan, ultimately I got to be 4% hydrostatic body fat,

more shredded as a working professional than I ever was as a professional athlete. And I was really using principles that at the time were considered to be almost, you know, voodoo or witchdoctory where I didn't care about a calorie deficit. I didn't kind of care about counting calories. All I wanted to do was eat delicious food every meal of every day and look forward to training. And I was able to combine those into a system that got me my boost online, uh,

I was able to get my following on Twitter and following on other social media platforms and ultimately was able to fulfill my dream leaving corporate America and teaching other people how to integrate these fitness principles into their lives, looking better, feeling better than they've ever felt in their lives enjoyably.

Yeah, there's a lot of people, obviously that would appeal to a lot of people. Obviously everybody wants to be, I want to eat as much as I want, enjoy the food and be shredded. I mean, that's sort of the holy grail in many ways for some people. And so obviously there's a lot of people that would be skeptical of claims made in that direction. But let me, I think some of the things, you know, obviously protein, I mean, I think you have to be,

living under a rock to not realize that protein is is a dominant macronutrient that's going to provide body composition i mean you know yes you need energy whether it's coming from carbs or fat that's that's true with protein i think needs to be the the base of the diet in my view you know i mean i know there's people disagree with that but that's i i say that more people would agree than disagree um let me ask you about the intensity thing because as someone who you know i'm i'm approaching 60 right now and i've got goals to sprint and jump and do all these things

And I find that that's exactly how I've shifted in my training philosophy is that I do very high intense things. I don't do a lot of volume with that. I do it relatively frequently and I don't feel as beat up even though I'm, I'm, I'm pushing my capacity, you know, fly 10 sprints, max jumps, max lifting, you know, things like that on a pretty regular basis. And I've been, I've been, you know, I've been lifting weights for 45 years. I've been doing this stuff for a long, long time and I've done, um,

I've done damn near everything. And, but I mean, that's something that I really, I really have found to be useful. So let me talk, cause you know, coming from as a professional athlete, you probably had a strength coach. You probably had, maybe that's some nutrition support. Maybe, maybe not depending on the program.

Did you find it, I mean, because I see a lot of the newer guys coming out there saying that some of the criticisms is they just grind people into the ground. And this is like, you know, condition, condition, condition at the, at the expense of health in many cases, at the expense of actual of what you're trying to develop as an athlete. So what are your, let me, let me delve more into this intensity stuff. What are you talking about when you mean that?

well i think you're exactly right a lot of coaching at the amateur and even professional level isn't really coaching it isn't really player development it's more of a weeding out process it's seeing who is too weak to stay healthy and overcome bad training or overcome bad guidance

And I think a lot of that has to do with the type of people who get into coaching in the first place is a lot of them were failed athletes themselves. And so the frameworks that they use and believe that they think will get players to the next level are the exact frameworks that failed to get them to the next level. It's a very military militant framework.

more is better mindset. And I think, you know, if I did a third of the volume that I did when I was a competitive athlete, I would have been a better athlete and stayed healthier longer. What a lot of people don't realize is people, a lot of them get their ideas for what an effective workout is from a Hollywood movie directed by a guy who never played sports and was certainly never a competitive athlete or an elite bodybuilder or anything like that.

And what I found over the years, almost accidentally, because I was creating a program that I wanted to do for fun. I wanted to go in the gym and I wanted to push myself and I wanted to set PRs. And it felt good when I knew that I was getting faster and knew that I was getting stronger. Only a year or two later, when I was like, is somebody putting steroids in my water? Why do I look like this in my early 30s? And I never looked like this when I was getting paid to play sports in my early 20s.

did I realize that a lot of the body's adaptations are almost certainly hormonal. And in order to get a hormonal adaptation, you need to do something that your body hasn't done before, which means you need to lift a weight that your body hasn't lifted before with good form, of course, or you need to condition at a level that your body hasn't conditioned at before. And if you're doing a high amount of volume,

By definition, you cannot do it at the level that your body hasn't done before. And so a lot of people think that the efficacy of a training plan is correlated with how much they sweat, how sore they got, or how hard it was. And there's elements of truth to that. An effective training plan will result in you sweating. It will result in

you getting a little bit sore and it will be hard, but those are not the main drivers. The main drivers of an effective training plan is are you able to do things today that you couldn't do last week? And is the plan structured with enough rest so that you are continually able to do things next week that you aren't able to do this week?

Yeah, very well said. And like I said, you said this movie, you think about the Rocky training montage. Was it Rocky III? Was it Rocky IV when he fought Ivan Drago? As a kid growing up, you're like, oh, that's how you got to train. You got to be in there. And I did that for years. I was a volume guy. I trained all

You know, I was one of the, one of those people that, you know, like there was one time, I don't know if you're familiar with Olympic lifting, but the Bulgarians used to dominate Olympic lifting in the like eighties, nineties. And the thought was they would throw a bunch of eggs against the wall and which ones, whatever ones didn't break would be the guys that made it through. So they would break a lot of people and a few guys could, could withstand that. And they became Olympic champions. And that's kind of the mantra is like you mentioned, it's a weeding out process who doesn't break the last guy standing by default, just, just due to, um,

you know, everybody else falling away is now a champion. But at the end of the day, I'm, you know, I'm really impressed to see what's coming, you know, because I think a lot more people are adopting these types of things. I think you're seeing better athletic performances. And that's great for athletes. But, you know, I'm almost 60. I'm not, no one's going to give me an athletic contract anytime soon. So my, in my view, it's like, what do I do

to perform well as an older human, just perform in life. And, you know, the things I liked, like dunk a basketball at 60 and sub 6400 meter and all that type of stuff that I don't have to do, but I want to do because it's fun because it translates to health in that, in that way. So outside of, you know, like I'm doing a heavy deadlift. Okay. We all understand. What are some of the other things that are intense based that you would, you would incorporate? I like measuring cardio. And so, and I like doing cardio first because

which is very much against what a lot of trainers would recommend. So I'll start with the second one first. I like doing cardio first because I don't think most people are properly warmed up for their lifts. If you are a highly specialized power lifter or Olympic lifter, I will trust that your dynamic warmup is sufficient to allow you to lift heavy sets without getting hurt. But I think for people in the general public, most of them, if they're gonna go lift, they go do a couple of warmup sets and then they lift.

it's like there's just no way that your core temperature is elevated there's no way that your blood is circulating to the necessary extent for you to have an effective lift if you haven't done some form of cardio beforehand and if you're in decent enough shape and you take a you know 10 15 minute break after an intense cardio session you can recover fully for your lift not to where you're actually lifting heavier from doing an intense cardio session before

Secondarily, I want your cardio session to be measured. So you talk about setting records and rowing. I prefer using an assault bike or some treadmill sprints. And what I'm doing is I'm measuring how fast I'm running or I'm measuring how fast my average interval sprint was, or I'm measuring what my average caloric output on the assault bike is not because I care about calories, but I use it as a measure of, you know, how hard I'm able to go.

And most people, when they do cardio, they think of it as a dumb activity that they do at the end of their workout. Oh, I gotta go get my steps in, I gotta go get my walking in, I gotta go burn some calories. And you don't actually burn substantial calories from the cardio that you're doing unless you're doing it for like hours a day.

What people don't realize is if you're able to do conditioning at a high intensity, that will result in a faster resting metabolic rate. So you're burning more calories outside the gym. And it's the same difference that happens when you look at wealth building between average income people and high income people.

High-income people build wealth in their sleep. They build wealth by owning equity in companies that are going up in value. Poor people think they need to build wealth by saving a lot of money. And that's exactly what you see when you look at a lot of people who are not in very good shape, but they're insistent on maintaining a 500-calorie-per-day deficit. Oh, I need to go do my 30 minutes of cardio so I can burn 350 calories. Combine that with a restrictive eating plan so I can be in a 500-calorie-per-day deficit. And it's like,

okay, I mean, that makes sense on paper, but you're not doing anything to address your resting metabolic rate. In fact, your resting metabolic rate is gonna go down if you follow a program like that because you're gonna lack the energy to have powerful workouts. And it's the same mistake that people make with wealth building. And so if you realize that the most powerful tool you have to be lean and fit is your resting metabolic rate and the way you rev your resting metabolic rate through the roof to the moon,

is by being able to train at a high intensity. You need to measure your output and everything that you do and ensure that your workouts are positioning you to output more than the previous week. Yeah. I think the measurements are valuable, particularly around performance and, and, you know, to be, just to be full, I've got an assault bike, I've got a, I've got a salt runner. So I, I do all these things I run and like you with the calories, I mean, you'd sit there 10 minutes, 10 seconds sprint. Can I hit 15 calories in 10 seconds or something like that? There was a,

is it is it usually intensity based i mean you're looking at you know because you you obviously with numbers you can look how long did i go what was my average wise but is it usually i'm trying to hit max intensity when you do these things is that typically where you're at or are you measuring different different metrics i combine it i i do intensity for 60 seconds and so you know i'm uh if i'm on an assault bike you know i try to average

20 if I'm getting close to a PR, 20 calories per 60 seconds, but I'm repeating that eight times, right? I'm taking rest in between and I'm repeating it eight times. Obviously, if I try to go as hard as I could for one 10 second sprint, you know, it might be, I don't think I get 15, but it might be possible for me to get 10.

something like that. But I think there needs to be some appropriate hybrid between the duration of your intensity and your actual intensity. Because if you were to go to the logical extreme of one, it's like, well, you can go hyper intense for two seconds, but that's probably not long enough.

um to actually make a meaningful impact on your resting metabolic rate and so the the duration that i have found to be you know most beneficial from a fat loss standpoint has been about 60 seconds but that doesn't mean i don't mix it up i don't try 30 seconds at times but 60 seconds tends to be the standard interval length that i do okay interesting and then you know as you mentioned you know part of the warm-up like warming up like if i'm gonna go if i'm gonna go run sprints um

The warm has to be there or I'm gonna hurt myself. I mean, that's just the reality, particularly as a nearly 60 year old guy that pushes pretty hard.

Are you familiar with something called Reflex Performance Reset, RPR? Is that something that ever trickled through your training or anything like that? I'm probably familiar with the concepts, but not the acronym. Yeah, it's something I got. A guy named Cal Dietz in particular has been promoting that. This is basically some drills to wake up the muscle groups. And it's kind of a mixture of voodoo and there's some science that shows efficacy. It's kind of mixed on that. So that's something that...

I've seen a lot of people advocate for, but as far as obviously being efficiently warmed up and that's the whole point of a warmup to warm up your body, kind of warm your muscles up. They perform better when they're, when they're warm, they're less likely to be injured when they're warm. How long, like, let's just say you're setting a designing a pro let's say I'm going to go in there and pull a heavy deadlift. How would you approach that workout from warmup to execution?

Oh, okay. So if you're going to go a heavy deadlift day, then the interval sprints are probably going to be a little bit shorter. So normally I would do eight interval sprints before a training session, but if it's a heavy deadlift day, it's probably going to be closer to five.

And so what that might mean is like a few minutes where I'm getting warm to actually do my interval sprints. You know, if it's on the treadmill, it might be a five minute jog. If it's on the assault bike, it might be a two minute warm up where I'm getting progressively faster, you know, every 10 seconds or so until the end.

take a few minute break and then I'm going 60 seconds on 60 seconds off repeat five times getting faster every time I go. So my first one's not going to be at 100%. The last one's going to be close to proceed close to my perceived 100%. But it's actually probably going to be closer to about 85 90% of my actual 100% out output, because it is the fifth of a series of five. And then I'm going to take about a 10 to 15 minute break. Maybe I'm going to get some carbs in me, you know, a little bit of a smoothie, some water, some salt,

And then I'm going to go warm up to do my deadlifts, which is going to include at least three working sets. I'm going to start with a working set of about 50% of what my actual, I'm gonna start with a warmup of about 50% of my working set, probably do eight to 10 reps of that.

then i'm going to scale up to maybe 70 of my working set and then i'm going to scale up to 85 to 90 of my working set um and then i'm going to start doing working sets and so uh and i might even do a fourth a fourth warm-up set if i'm going to be doing a peak uh top set

And so, you know, particularly with the heavy compound lifts, you know, you need to be doing multiple warmup sets as you get more advanced in your lifting, because, you know, I'll tell you that last year, uh, when I was doing heavy Zurcher squats, um, my PR doing Zurcher squats was 425 pounds for four reps. But I'll tell you that when I was doing my warmups at 335 pounds, 365 pounds at 385 pounds, every single set felt the same weight.

So my body, my nervous system was just getting primed to lift heavier and heavier weight. But the perceived weight I was lifting was

Felt exactly the same, despite the fact that I was adding 30 to 50 pounds to the bar every set until I got to my final top set. And so a lot of people think that, oh, you know, I can do two sets of warmups and then I'm good to go. It's like, well, maybe you can if you're an intermediate or beginner lifter. But as your central nervous system becomes more efficient at leveraging a larger portion of your skeletal structure to move weight, you need longer warmups.

Yeah, the central nervous system component is, I don't know if it's underrated, but it's underappreciated by, I think, the general population. You know, I think athletes have a little bit more insight in this. And it's interesting to see the carryover in some of this stuff. Because if you, you know, push that nervous system very hard, I mean, obviously there's a limit to where it becomes detrimental. But if you do that, it'll often carry over to other aspects. You know, I've seen people talking about

running max velocity sprinting, you know, when you hit max velocity, you know, maybe 30, 40 meters in care and doing that on a regular basis, actually carry everything like bat speed. Yeah. It's because the whole body is just conditioned to, to fire a little more quickly. And so it's quite an interesting, uh, uh, interesting bit of, uh, data about that.

So obviously you're no longer playing professional baseball. So that's not a monkey on your back that you have to deal with. You're just living life and want to be, I mean, assumingly fit and active and healthy. So what are the valuable things that you utilize from the training side? And then we can talk about the other lifestyle aspects. But I mean, is it a certain amount of conditioning versus fitness versus intensity versus lifting versus, you know, what's in the mix?

it depends what my goal for that particular season is so if i want to get leaner i don't do anything really from a diet standpoint i just switch my focus into trying to set prs on the treadmill and on the assault bike and if i want to gain muscle then i switch my focus to maintaining what i'm doing on the conditioning side and you know pushing myself on the lifting side

But what I've learned from all of this, particularly as a type A individual, and these are the types of individuals I coach the best because I'm that way. We benefit more from doing less. And so rest is the hardest component for a hardworking individual to master because we have gotten to where we are in life by working hard. And I've realized over the years that I'm good at working hard.

I don't need to get better at working hard. I need to get better at resting so that when I'm working hard, I can actually work harder. I'm not going to be able to push myself harder by pushing myself harder. I'm only going to be able to push myself harder by being kinder to myself and allowing myself to fully rest and recuperate, prioritize sleep, prioritize eating a large amount of food and really value. It's like a yin and a yang. They go together. The rest and the performance. You can't have one without the other.

And so ultimately, I'm shifting my focus also to just feeling good. If I'm pushing myself more than once a week through a workout that I don't want to do, it's a signal to me that I'm pushing myself too hard. And with this fitness system that I've created, the mental models and the frameworks apply to everywhere in life. If you're stuck in fitness, you're either doing too much, you're doing too little, or you're doing the wrong thing.

And it takes a lot of discipline to figure out which one of those three it is and actually create a game plan to troubleshoot it. But the same thing is true with life. The same thing is true with growing your business. You know, if one thing is throttled in one area, simply doing more isn't necessarily guaranteed to get you any better results. In fact, it could set you further back.

And so having the mental awareness and the flexibility to be humble enough to know when you might be wrong and knowing your mental models and assumptions might need to be reformatted is tremendously useful everywhere in life. And so that's why I've been fortunate enough to kind of grow beyond simply working with people from a fitness standpoint, but also helping them in their businesses and in their executive lives, because the principles that we learn through diet and exercise

uh really play almost everywhere yeah that's i i think that's certainly obviously true in my life is you know if you're not taking care of things in the in the in the performance side you know with physical fitness then

other things seem to fall down. I mean, you know, you see, there's a lot of, and you probably see a lot of people that are scaling a corporate ladder or CEOs or entrepreneurs, and they just abuse their health. I mean, they just, you know, they're just, they're just, they're wrecked. And then, and then if they make it, and many of them don't, because, you know, as you know, startups, most of them fail. If they don't make it, then, or, you know, then they're like, okay, they've got a wrecked health. But if they do make it, and then they've got a decent amount of wealth, now their main priority is how the hell do I get

un-sick now. And so, so it's like, maybe you could avoid that from the, from the beginning there. You're, you know, you used to, you talk about a fitness program that you have. Um, how, how,

I wouldn't say scalable, but how applicable it is to, because not everybody's going to have access to certain things. You know, professional athletes have access to wonderful tools and recovery things and all that type of stuff. And not everybody has some people like, you know, maybe they, maybe they just have what they have at home. So how do we, how do we, how do we, uh, you know, sort of, uh, scale that to, to the average person?

So I will say that my program works better for men than it does for women. It would work for a smaller percentage of the female population. Those who do have a substantial athletic background, you know, at least we're very good athletes in high school. It could potentially work for them. But it's predominantly men.

because lifting reasonable amounts of weight. And when I say reasonable, it's like if you can bench press your body weight for 10 and you can do 10 to 15 pull ups, that's what I mean by reasonable. People who have that level of fitness baseline tend to have substantially better results when they switch to

My style of programming compared to what a mainstream conventional program is. You don't need to have highly specialized equipment like an assault bike is very helpful. But, you know, you can run sprints on a track, particularly if you're under 200 pounds and running sprints doesn't place undue load or strain on your knees or hips or back.

So you could do that with basically no equipment if your body's already situated or you could spend a few hundred dollars going Craigslist and getting a salt bike. You can do a lot of the movements that I talked through with a simple barbell or maybe with the cable stack. So if you have

You know squat rack with some weights at home. Maybe a planet fitness membership you can probably do 90% of the of the programming that I write Basically, it's you know, is your upper back getting stronger is your hip hinge getting stronger or your hamstrings getting stronger? Is your chest and shoulders getting stronger? Okay, like if your legs getting stronger your quads getting stronger your calves getting stronger is your core getting stronger and

uh those don't require highly specialized equipment they really just acquire uh require you to focus and you know heavy enough resistance to where you can you can progress right you know we're not we're not creating calisthenics programs here but we don't actually need substantially more resistance than a traditional calisthenic program we just need some resistance uh in all planes of motion hey folks it's dr sean baker here hey if you or someone you love is

suffering from chronic disease and you're tired of just managing symptoms with potions, pills, and procedures, I want you to check out revero.com. Our team of dedicated professionals is committed to tackling the root cause of your issue and finally getting you healthy. Hurry up though, our spaces are filling up very quickly.

So, I mean, obviously you've been talking a lot about lifting and some of the cardio component in there. What, are there anything else that, I mean, I mean, there's, there's things like plyometrics, isometrics, there's obviously different forms of, you know, exercise.

that are available to us? What's on your palette if you're coloring? - I like isometrics for rehab, right? Especially as I'm getting older, may not seem old to you, but I'm definitely old for an elite athlete. That means, you know,

At the intensity that we're pushing ourselves, you know, we're going to have grade one strains one, two times a year. And that means we have to dial our training back for two weeks here, two weeks there and do more isometric work to to strengthen muscles that had mild strains to them. Whether that means a wall sit, whether that means 30 30s, if you have an adductor strain. So isometric work I like from a rehab standpoint.

Plyometrics, I think, are good just to keep your Achilles strong. I don't think that plyometrics are actually necessary from a fat loss standpoint. I think they're more functional for people who actually want to play sports and not get injured. I think they're helpful. But if you just want to look good, I don't think that plyometrics are that essential. But I do think mobility work is very essential for people as they get older because particularly your shoulders, your hips, if you're tall, your hips and lower back,

All of those weak links in your chain are going to start to get exposed if your body can't move fluidly. And so I spend a good amount of time doing mobility work and I program mobility work for all my clients because the more fluidly we can keep everything moving, the healthier we have a chance to be, the less wear and tear we're going to load up on particular portions of our joints.

and so i think that's one thing that a lot of people don't develop the habits around in their 20s and 30s and by the time they get to their 40s a lot of things hurt in ways that they don't have to uh other things that i consider to be important sun exposure you know i uh i started tracking my vitamin d exposure outside a couple months ago and i'll tell you sean you know the the hour hour and a half that i'm spending every day outside with my shirt off

It's resulted in aches and pains that I've carried for years just going away. It's almost as if I got like multiple places in my body scoped.

and the only main difference is I'm going outside more. And so I think a lot of people are deficient in vitamin D and ultimately when we want to create a program that's sustainable, we need to have a body that's free of chronic pain. And the way we're going to do that is by reducing inflammation, both in our diet, but also, you know, making sure we're not deficient in necessary vitamins and nutrients.

And a lot of Americans, particularly those of us who live on the northern side, not me, but those Americans who do, we're not getting enough vitamin D in the winter, particularly if we have office jobs. We're not taking vacations. You need to have a lot of skin, shirtless exposure.

during all months out of the year, but particularly in the winter, if you want to not be vitamin D deficient and you're not orally supplementing it. And there's just not that many people who have the time in their day or the desire to do that. And I think when you want to get in better shape, you have to realize that you're probably going to be in as good shape as your weakest link will allow. And, you know, every individual is going to have a different weak link that they need to address. But for vast majority of Americans, vitamin D is probably one of them.

Yeah, it's almost as if human species evolved, you know,

outside without a lot of clothes on us. I think that's pretty intuitively obvious, or should be, but we kind of now cover up, hide indoors, wear sunscreen everywhere we go. Are you a sunscreen guy? Are you just avoiding sunburn? Are you avoiding sun in the midday when you're more likely to burn? Or how do you-- - So I've had women in my life insist on some sunscreen, so I'll put it on my face, but I don't put it on the rest of my body.

I actually do get midday sun because in order to have my vitamin D levels increase, I do need UVB exposure. And so, you know, I try to cover my face up and try to have as much of my body exposed to the sun as possible so that I can minimize the minutes or hours that I'm spending under that intense sunshine.

I'll get my vitamin D levels checked in probably a month or two and see if I've been getting more vitamin D than I've realized.

I probably averaged 40 minutes a day. I'd say 60, 90 minutes on sunny days, but not every day is going to be sunny. And so maybe 40 minutes on average. And that's gotten me into a healthy range according to the app tracker that I'm using. But maybe I'm very sufficiently in a healthy range and I can get away with half as much. And so I think the goal is minimum viable dose, minimum viable sunscreen, minimum viable exposure to the places of your body that are already overexposed to the sun.

You know, and I don't know if you've seen that with, with in, in the circles that I have run in over the years, you know, as people clean up their diets, they often will con comment that at the same time they become more sun tolerant. That is to say, if they're eating a garbage diet, they burn a lot easier. And then when I get rid of that, the burning goes and some people posits due to certain oils or sugar or whatever it might be. Is that anything you've noticed or observed with your own or the people you work with?

I've personally not burned that much unless I'm doing something that is very not smart, like jumping in a water park without having much sun exposure all summer when I'm 10 years old, thinking that being exposed to the high sun for four hours is good. It's a good idea. I'm pretty sure no matter what diet I'd be having with that sort of baseline, I was going to get sunburned.

um and you know i don't have a very high seed oil diet neither do the people who i work with and so i'm very inclined to believe that anytime you're adding inflammatory sources to your body our tolerance for other stressors is going to go down so i think the human body is incredibly adept at fighting single front wars

And so if you have one stressor that's being placed on your body, there's a very good chance that you're going to beat it. But the more stressors you layer onto your body, whether it's an inflammatory diet, whether it's being overweight, very commonly both of those are linked together, having higher blood sugar than you should have.

then you start fighting multi front wars, two fronts, three fronts, fronts, four fronts. And at some point your body can't fight a four or five front war. And so it's going to be a lot easier for that weak link to get exposed. And so the more you can take your body out of a

a constant state of battle to where it can focus on one or two fronts to fight at a time, the more likely it is that you're gonna succeed. And I think we saw that most recently with the pandemic. It's like you look at all the people who are getting sick, the ones who didn't take the shots,

And, you know, they were the ones who were fat. They were the ones who were already fighting a multi-front war. And then when you had a third battle to fight, then they couldn't handle it. And so your body's strong, trust your body to heal and to fight off toxins or challenging circumstances, but it's also human and it can't fight 10 battles at the same time.

Yeah, I mean, certainly with the COVID stuff, I mean, yeah, it was pretty obvious that the obese, diabetic, immunocompromised people were the ones that were truly at risk. And we did a horrible job as a country sort of working on that, which is hopefully something that will improve over the coming years. So as far as I think one of the things that you are...

passionate about is efficiency, maybe a ruthless efficiency. Can you talk a little bit about how that, how you apply that in general life? - Yeah, so most people get the wrong idea of how to approach life by the schooling that we were miseducated by. Schooling tends to reward you for large volumes of work.

If you go to medical school, you're not going to just be the smartest kid in the class and graduate unless you're willing to spend a lot of time memorizing things that you probably don't really use today at the level you were tested with. So our entire formative years, as well as our early years, if we work in corporate jobs, we are trained to believe that more is better.

um what you have probably figured out what i figured out with the most successful people in in this world have figured out is we need to figure out what our core competencies are

Because if we can't build a monopoly around a product or service that we're providing or an effective monopoly, then we have no pricing power. If we have no pricing power, we have no leverage. If we have no leverage, we live at the mercy of the people who have leverage over us. And so I know a lot of doctors who are very miserable in their professions because they've played by the rules their entire careers. They're working with a bunch of bureaucrats. Most of their work is

uh clerical in nature they're not really given the the latitude to use their brain the way that uh you know they think it can be used and it's because they never doubled down on their strengths they never thought okay how am i different from other people and how am i going to get paid for it and if you can figure out like what is your unique selling point

And then you double or triple down on that unique selling point. All of a sudden, you can be bad at a lot of things that people swear you have to be adequate at. I mean, Donald Trump is a perfect example. Donald Trump would not pass an employment interview at a majority of Fortune 500 companies, but he would probably be a more successful CEO than a strong percentage of the ones in charge.

And so if you're trying to perfect the skill set of a drone or of a middle manager or of an employee, then at best, you're going to be a drone or a middle manager or an employee. And those people typically aren't very happy with their lives. But if you're willing to take a little bit of a risk, if you're willing to bet on yourself, if you're willing to understand how you're different from other people, and rather than see it as something that impedes you, but see it as something that separates you and that can make you unique,

all of a sudden you can find yourself working less, making more, being happier, having more time that you can then reinvest in other areas of your life and continue to grow at a faster rate than your peers and personal growth compounds. If you can grow at 15% per year, within five years, you're twice the person you were today.

Most people, if they're stagnating in life and they're overworked in certain areas, following paths that experts swear they have to follow, their personal growth rate might be 1% or 2%. And so by the time they're 70 years old, they're kind of the same person they were when they were 40. And that's no way to live. And that's something that I try to help people not do.

um you know some people would say well we need drones in society otherwise it won't it won't function without the people that do sort of the I guess the menial work or something not to disparage anybody but I I guess with the coming I mean if you look at the where the future's going I mean we're gonna have all these robots running around they're going to be doing a lot of these tasks that otherwise humans would do that's that's going to be the reality in the next you know a few dozen years I think maybe 20 years

it'll probably take a significant part and you've got to what are the rest of the humans do you know and is there uh i mean as you mentioned you know the people that do better in your program males that are reasonably fit have some you know baseline competencies when it comes to physical performance um

What about the rest of the people? Do you ever have somebody that's just grossly overweight and just completely sedentary? How do you get to those people? Because not everybody can start out. I can guarantee not everybody can start out doing 10 pull-ups. That's probably a minority of Americans, right? Well, the second bucket of people who I'm highly effective with are people who like savory foods and are not alcoholics.

So I've not quite cracked the nut on how to help alcoholics because no amount of alcohol you drink can be overcome by exercise. It distorts your hormonal composition. And if you're drinking 30, 40 drinks a week, I just I can't help you. But people who prefer savory foods,

um you know tend to be easy to help even if they have very minimal weightlifting experience because you know what i can help them do is just listen to their hunger signals and listen to their cues and i can take that person most likely that person is eating because it's a meal time rather than eating because they're hungry and so if you teach that person to understand what hunger actually feels like they might only end up eating two meals per day instead of three or four but

But they're never going hungry, right? They're never in need of food. We're just teaching you, you know, food tastes better when you're hungry. You're not actually hungry when you're eating breakfast. You're eating it because it's there. You're eating it because you're worried about being hungry later. You know, that business dinner that you're going to, you're not actually hungry there. So you might as well order some seafood because you really don't need food if your body's not craving it.

you know teaching people just to eat in accordance with their hunger signals and that was the first hack that i learned as an athlete that if i just ate according to my hunger signals the amount of food that i was that i was eating aligned much better with my energy needs than what some arbitrary number said

And so diet is half of the equation. I don't think I don't go so far as to say abs are made in the kitchen because I do say I do think that the workout program is very helpful as well. But if you weigh, you know, 300 pounds, abs aren't your goal. You know, you want to get down to 250 first before you can start thinking about abs. And the way you get from 300 to 250 is by listening to your hunger cues, not drinking alcohol excessively, not eating sugar, you know, ideally much at all.

Um, and really having a protein focused diet, getting rid of those processed foods, learning what protein you like to cook at home. What's easy to prep and, you know, getting your hunger signals more closely aligned with what your body actually needs. I've had people lose 40, 50 pounds working with me, you know, without even going to the gym.

And so as I mentioned, those who do have an athletic foundation have a higher percentage chance of getting that dream body working with me. But if you like savory foods, if you're cool with eating protein dominant real food, you're not much of a stress eater, there's a really good chance that we can get you down 40 pounds if you have that much to lose.

Yeah, I mean, there's, I think there's a, you know, obviously when you talk about people that are not savory, these are people who usually have addictions to sweet, sweet type foods and they just can't stop eating chocolate cake. Difference between going, let's say going from 300 to 250, which I think is generally really easy to do for a lot of people, but then going from 200.

you know 16 18 body fat to sub 10 body fat how do you how do you different is there a difference in in the way you approach those two different yeah yeah if you're going from 30 to 16 to 18 body fat it's predominantly how much can you focus on your diet right um not eating when you're not hungry not eating because you're bored not eating because you're stressed uh not eating too much sugar

If you stop doing all those things and you walk regularly, you're probably gonna go from 30% to 16, 18% body fat. The challenging thing-- - As a male, as put-- - As a male, yeah. Women are gonna be higher than that, yeah. And so then there's a two-phase leap after that. So there's the 16 to 18% body fat down to 14% body fat, and then there's the 14 down to 10.

um generally speaking you can be at 16 to 18 body fat without having a very conditioned body you don't want to jump straight into high intensity training without having a training foundation and so while lifting and conditioning at a high intensity will do more for your resting metabolic rate if your body's not primed for it then you're just asking to get injured

And so if you build a foundational program that has perhaps a little bit more volume than what I would recommend for more advanced lifters or trainees, uh, you know, that's what you would probably be following when you're going from like the 18 to 14% body fat range. Um, you're getting used to a resistance training program. You're getting used to the motions. You're able to bench press your body weight. You're able to do pull-ups, um, with your body weight. You're able to squat, you know, your body body weight plus 25%.

on a barbell or something like that. Very good chance if you pair that with an effective diet and you're continuing to get your steps in, getting your cardio in, you can get to 14, 15% body fat.

If you want to get below 14, 15% body fat, you have two paths to follow. You can do highly restrictive dieting, which has a chance of getting you there, but it's only for a short period of time because you're going to rebound and probably over consume food and end up higher than you were prior to that short term attempt.

uh that's one attempt that a lot of people do and they struggle with they fail with or you can turn yourself into an athlete and turning yourself into an athlete you know that means being able to do you know 10 pull-ups with a 25 pound dumbbell in between your feet that means being able to squat 225 275 pounds

for 10 reps or an equivalent movement if squats aren't good for your skeletal structure. That means being able to deadlift 365 to 400 pounds for reps or with a hex bar if you want to do it a little bit more safely on your lower back.

And so at that point, if you want to do if you want to be 10% body fat and you want to be 10% body fat more sustainably, it does help for you to push your numbers to that of, you know, an advanced high school athlete or lower tier college athlete. And that doesn't mean that you need to be pushing the numbers of an elite professional athlete. But the numbers that you are pushing, you know, the vast majority of people aren't going to be dead lifting 365 pounds.

Um, you will be one of the stronger people at your gym. If you're deadlifting 365 pounds for reps, you will never make it at, uh, you know, at an elite, uh, or even, you know, local powerlifting meet. Um, so, you know, there's a difference between being hyper-focused and hyper-specialized versus just being, you know, a generally good athlete who could perform a lift, uh, you know, like a starter on a varsity football team.

That's where you should focus on being if you want to jump from 14% body fat to 10% body fat and you want to do it sustainably. Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I mean, and there's some, as you mentioned, training like an athlete, becoming an athlete, form often follows function. And if you look at that, if you look at like an elite level sprinter, none of them are walking around with a big belly. I mean, it just didn't happen. I mean, they're all 10, 12, 8% body fat, something like that.

And I guess the other thing is that you mentioned, you know, you can do a really straight, like a lot of bodybuilders, they'll go to, they'll do this and they'll get down obviously ridiculously late and they'll be down, you know, 4% body fat or something like that. And it's very fleeting. I mean, they can maintain it for, you know, a day or two and then, and then they're, they, they always have this rebound, you know,

eat pizza and ice cream for a couple of weeks until they, but how do you, you know, I guess a lot of people are saying, yes, they've been there. They've gotten there. How do you sustain a lower body fat? And, and I mean, obviously 4% probably is not

even advisable, but I mean, 10% for a male, depending on how you obviously measure measurement techniques, but let's just say visible, relatively lean abs. How is that sustainable long-term? What are the, what are the techniques for that? You just need to be able to sustain your athletic output. You know, you look at high performing athletes, none of them are, uh,

trying to be on uh calorically restrictive plans and other ones with abs who are high performing athletes outside of weight class sports are trying to be on calorically restrictive diets if anything they're trying to eat more food to keep up with their workouts but you don't need to be doing five hours of workouts like uh you know an elite pro athlete might say he does i don't actually think they're doing five hours per week i think that's a little bit uh dramatized or dramatized but um

You know, you need to make sure that your performance is there. The good news is when you have a foundation, your performance doesn't really require much to be maintained. If you can get your deadlift to, you know, 400 pounds or something like that.

You can hang around 365 as a max. And I'm just saying deadlift as an example, you don't have to do deadlifts by any means. But if you can get your deadlift to where you're doing 400 pounds for reps, you can fairly easily maintain in the mid threes or high threes without a ton of effort.

And so if you just make sure that your body is always within striking distance of being in very good shape, that's one of the easiest things to maintain as you go through multiple seasons in life, because not everybody can get paid money to be hyper physically fit. Everybody wants to be in good shape. And so the thing that you have to remind yourself is that you always have an obligation to your body. Even if you're not writing an actual check to your body, the rent always comes due.

And so I asked people, you know, how many days do you forget to brush your teeth? Right. Do you brush your teeth every day, no matter how busy you are? Okay. Well, you know, you have an obligation to all parts of your body, no matter how busy you are. And,

And, you know, maybe that means you're not necessarily getting physical exercise 100% of your days, but more days than not, you should be doing something that's going to put yourself in a better position to move, a better position to function. Otherwise, you know, what would you expect to happen if you stop brushing your teeth for six weeks because you got really busy, right? Nobody does that, but people do that to their bodies all the time.

Yeah. I mean, you mentioned deadlifting and well, I think it's important to be strong and I think that's a great exercise to do that night. And I did lift all the time, but there's a lot of fat power lifters out there. I mean, obviously there's more to it than, you know, I mean, you know, if you say, Hey, I can deadlift 600 pounds. Great. I could be a hundred pounds overweight and do that. Uh, but I can't do pull-ups. I'm not going to knock, I'm not going to knock out 20 pull-ups at that weight. So, so what are, I mean, if you were like saying, if I were to say,

these are a grouping of goals that an athlete, if he can perform those, is going to just by the nature of that be relatively late. What would you say those things are? Yeah. So I put this challenge out on Twitter like six years ago and nobody properly addressed it where I said, I will give anybody $100 if they can parallel squat 315 pounds

Run a six minute mile and be over 12% calipered body fat probably 15% Dexa 60% Dexa and the only responses I got were from people saying oh I could do that, but I need to get fatter or I could I could do that. Here's my squat Oh, actually you're not doing a parallel squat or I can do that. I can run a 658 mile It's like yeah, you're not running a six minute mile so

So irrespective of the calories that you consume, if you can run a six minute mile, which very few people can, but if you can run a six minute mile parallel squat, 315 pounds, unless you are an elite rugby player or an elite football player, you probably look pretty damn good with your shirt off.

And so six minutes might be untouchable for people, particularly as they get in their 40s or 50s. But seven minutes should be a reasonable goal that I think anybody under 60 should at least strive for. And if you can consistently run a seven minute mile and bang out 12 to 15 pull ups and body weight squat 1.25 your weight to parallel for ten reps,

You might not look like a Mr. Olympia walking around at the beach, but you're going to look pretty damn good. You are going to be probably in near the best shape of anybody on your block because you're surrounded by dad bods in the US. And so start there, seven minute mile, 1.25 times your body weight, parallel squat times 10 and do 15 pull-ups body weight.

Yeah. Yeah. I would say it would be tough to do that with, with, with a, with a poor body composition for sure. And, uh, that is something that, um, you know, if, if you were to say what percentage of the male population could actually do that, I mean, it's gotta be, uh,

in the very low you know one to two percent of young guys and when you get into the old guys it's going to be probably i don't even know what the number would be well below one percent would that be a fair guess on your part i think that's right but most people don't try right so ninety percent of people aren't even trying so you can just take them out of the equate probably 95 of people aren't even trying so you can take those people out of the equation and so what that means is if one percent of the population can do it

you know it's 20 of the people who are actually like writing this down is this is my goal i'm going to do it well 20 of them are actually going to do it if you're actually focused on making your degree of physical fitness a priority in your life one out of five is actually going to be able to do it um and if you're a competitive person 20 it's like a lot higher chances than almost anything else you've succeeded in in life so that's a that's a pretty good shot

Yeah. And I think a lot of people that have no interest, like I'll, you know, I'll, I'll put some of the stuff I'm doing out there and they're like, oh, my knees on my back. I'd never do that. You know, just watching you makes my back hurt. My back doesn't hurt. I'm like, I'm fine. I'm good. I've been doing this stuff for 50 years.

But some of that, again, I think it comes back to nutrition. And this is a part that I'm very interested in is the fact that how nutrition impacts the musculoskeletal system and the inflammation and the joint health and how you feel and how you do it. Because if you're eating a garbage diet, you just don't feel like doing this stuff. It's no fun to go to the gym when your knee hurts. No one's going to be squatting when their knee hurts. I mean, it's just...

It's just, you got to, you got to figure that component out in my experience. And so that's something that I'm glad you mentioned a very protein heavy meat centric diet, which I think provides that level of satiety. So you just don't want that garbage. I mean, that's, that's something that I've, I've seen be very helpful.

And everything compounds, right? And so, you know, the better you eat, the better you're going to train, the better you're going to sleep, the better you're going to feel, the less inflammation you're going to have. And the reverse is also true, right? You eat worse, you train worse, you sleep worse, you have more inflammation, you don't want to train as much. And so momentum is one of the strongest rules to live by in life where, you know, the easiest way to win twice is by winning once, right? You have a much better chance of making a second shot after you made the first shot. So focus on getting the first shot in the basket.

Yeah, that certainly holds true in much things in life. Well, Alex, we're just about out of time here. So I want to just give you a chance to maybe share where people can find out more from you. Where would they go? Where would they find? And what do you have offerings for those folks? Follow me on social media, Alex Feinberg1. I think my handle may be in the image there.

But Alex Feinberg won across all social medias. I keep my DMs open, so shoot me a message if you're interested in learning more. You can go to feinbergsystems.com, F-E-I-N-B-E-R-G systems.com. If you're interested in one-on-one coaching, click the button in the top right-hand corner to see if we might be a good fit. If you're a type A individual who's used to winning and want to win more and live at a

a higher energy threshold, uh, you know, experiencing and integrating frameworks that you have not yet integrated into your life, but know that you need to, if you want to get to the next level, reach out and a pretty good chance. I'll blow your mind in about 10 or 15 minutes on the phone and we can see if it makes sense to work together.

What part of the world are you located in? I don't know if you do. Austin, Texas. Austin, Texas. Yeah, good place. Awesome. Alex, pleasure. Good chatting with you. I'm sure we'll talk again at some point. Thank you very much. Thanks so much, Sean.