 In today's episode, we're going to talk about 10 actionable tips for a leaner, fitter, stronger, more muscular body when you're 40 years old or older. You know, it's interesting because, um, uh, you know, this is, you know, beginner tips apply across the board, right? So whenever we talk about just getting started or it's the same, regardless of your age, and there's always an individual variance, right? And considerations today's episode really is about people who are active, who start to notice different things, right? There's special considerations generally speaking for people 40 and over who still work out that, um, if you take these considerations seriously, then you're going to continue to feel good, progress, not meet the fate of a lot of people that once they start to get over 40, when they keep working out, which is like injury and burnout and that kind of stuff. And so that's really the focus of this. Yeah. But I also think it's, it's important that we talk, what we talk about on the podcast all the time is that there's always going to be an individual variance no matter what, right? So, um, you know, we do our best to put episodes, to put programs, to put content together that is, um, you know, all the information and, and data and experience that we've gathered in two decades of things that are most common. Right. So it doesn't mean that, you know, just because we're, we're labeling, this is 40 plus, these are things, doesn't mean that somebody who's 30 couldn't extremely benefit from all these same exact tips. And it doesn't mean somebody who's 40 something can't train like maybe a 20 year old, there's always going to be these anomalies. And so before everybody gets all, oh, that's ridiculous. So it has to be for, no, it's not like that. It's, uh, we've trained a lot of people and a lot of people in advanced age and over 40 years old, and there seems to be, uh, a, a lot of things that they have in common on areas that tend to benefit them the most. Right. So the main ones are, you know, if you've been working out for a little while, a few years, 10 years, 20 years longer, and you, once you start to get into this age group, the cumulative potential for injury, right? So the, the poor movement patterns over time, slight deviations in form and technique with your exercise or when you're running or when you're cycling or whatever, you know, you're not going to notice them right out the gates, right? So we're not talking about like injury. That's a totally different conversation. This is like, Oh, I've been barbell squatting for, for five years. Now I'm starting to notice certain issues, right? And what it was, was over time, your form was off just enough to where over time you have this cumulative issue that starts to build up and the older you get, the more the potential, uh, uh, you know, that this can happen. It's a lot like your analogy with the sliding glass door in the track. And, and it's just that, that micro, that, that, that millimeter off, you know, eventually like turns into, it just gets, like, it gradually separates itself over time even greater. And so at that point, it becomes even more of a problem that's very noticeable, but a lot of these little things like, we're just thinking about how to then progress or keep you, uh, gaining and garnering the benefits of training longer in your journey. Yes. And there's also, you know, you're, you're more likely to have more responsibilities and more stress in your life when you're over 40. I think this is generally true, right? Yeah. 20 year olds tend to not have mortgages and kids and, you know, really stressful careers or people who they're responsible for. So they have to, you know, consider that. Um, and then of course with that comes less time to waste, right? So I can't go to the gym and just do a bunch of superfluous movements and exercises. Like I have to go in there and it has to be effective because I only have so much time. And then hormone changes, right? Um, hormone changes don't have to happen. Of course there's menopause, which is a part of natural aging with women. But the big, your body essentially becomes more sensitive to stresses over time to where, for example, a young man's testosterone won't be affected by certain things, lifestyle factors than like a versus an older man, right? So hormones are also a special consideration. So though that's the kind of the context here. All right, everybody, today's giveaway is the super bundle. If you want to win that, you have to enter. Here's how you enter. Leave a comment below this video in the first 24 hours that we drop it. Subscribe to this channel and turn on notifications. If you win, we'll let you know in the comments section. Also maps, 40 plus the launch is still happening. If you're watching this one, we drop it. We still have some time to take advantage of the sale. So if you're interested, what you got to do is click on the link at the top of the description below. That'll get you $80 off and two free ebooks. All right, here comes the show. Now, do you think there's some benefits to this also? Like, for example, like the very first one is for to use effective but less risky exercises, right? So, and I think of things like box squats, sled work, trap bar, movements like that. Do you think that there is some, some advantage of being 40 plus and having trained 20 years to that? I've done, you know, decades of deadlifting barbell back squats, maybe some of the explosive movements, more things that are considered more risky. And therefore I can get even more out of these movements than maybe say like a beginner who's never lifted before. I mean, there's always value in all those movements. So when you name some of the best movements, you could possibly do. But here's the problem. Whenever people try to pick a less risky exercise for a particular area, what they end up trading is results. Yeah, and an effectiveness, right? So people will say, oh, I can't squat anymore. So now let me go do leg extensions and leg curls, right? Because it's super safe. I'm not going to hurt myself, but you've traded a lot of results, a lot of, you know, muscle building potential and fat loss and functional strength because you've picked the wrong exercise. So what's important is to know what exercises you can use instead of others where you're not trading, you're not making that trade. Or if you do, it's very minimal, right? So like you mentioned, the box squats, box squats and traditional barbell squats are almost identical in terms of what they'll produce for the body. The difference is the box stops you at the bottom. You pause and you don't have to do that change of direction where the weight on your bar on the bar temporarily becomes heavier because of the change of momentum. And that's where the deviations of form tend to happen. So instead of doing a traditional barbell squat where you go up and down, you slowly sit down in a box, you wait, and then you come back up. Both of them are squats. Both of them you have weight on your back. Both of them develop the lower body, exceptionally well. In fact, strength athletes use box squats quite a bit because it's such a powerful exercise. Sled work is another one. Sled work is extremely valuable for high level athletes. It's also extremely valuable for beginners. It's also extremely valuable for people with a lot of experience. It connects the foot all the way up to the hip. It requires not as much technique and skill as other exercises and eliminates the negative portion of the rep, which is where a lot of muscle damage tends to happen, which means you can perform it more frequently. Sled work is super valuable for almost no impact on your joints. Yes, yes, all muscular. And that's the beauty of it. It's just like at any time you have control over how much effort or force you want to output with it. Have you seen the actual numbers or measurement of the stress and impact on the joint, on the change of direction? Do you know it? I know it's a lot. It depends on the speed of what you lower. Like if you lower, if you watch. Oh yeah, you're doing like an Olympic, yeah, squat. There's a formula, which I don't know what it is, right? But if you go down, if you have 100 pounds and you go down a certain speed, that change of direction, right? You use like a millisecond or that weight went from 100 to 120 because you have to change the momentum. Yeah, I actually think it's significantly more than that. Probably. Yeah, no, I think it's, I think it's like, I mean, it may not feel like it's 500 pounds, but the pressure that it puts on the the joints and the ligaments by changing directions like that is just way higher, which is also part of what can have some benefit to it. But then when you look way out the risk versus reward as we as we get older, that's where that will think about it. Like when you're going down like a barbell squat and then you're about to change directions, like you may be like perfect form, perfect form, perfect form. But then that temporary change of direction because you just literally increase the weight by 10%, 15%. Now, if you were on the edge of maybe your technique being a little off, now that's what ends up happening because the load is a bit much. So you either have to use way less load, which is one option where we could use a box and a box. Look, look, I know, like Stan Efforting is a good example. He's like one of the strongest, he was, it was at one point the strongest bodybuilder that there was very strong power lifter as well. He uses the box quite a bit now as he's gotten into his forties. And he bring that up when we last time he was here off air. We were talking about that. He said, hey, he said like he mostly does that. Yes. Yeah. That's where I started. That's where I started really playing with it. And I said, well, and when I go back to my traditional squats, there's no, no loss, no loss in strength. Yeah. I told my friend this exact, we had this exact conversation because he got it, he trained a lot with me in college. And then I've been helping him kind of get back in through some of our programming and was like, you know, I love this. I feel stronger. Everything's going great. I do have a lot of joint pain and, you know, and I'm kind of working my way through all these things. And, and so I was telling him these exact things of like, let's include the box squad. Let's include, you know, the trap bar dead list because, you know, that there is that point to where it's like you, you need to have like the most effective, like best, uh, mechanically sound lift when you're doing a dead list. And, and so there's just like a little bit less margin of error there versus like the trap bar itself. We're distributing that load a little bit more anteriorly. So now we can include, you know, a little bit more muscles to help. It's a little bit more of, you know, feeling more of a squat. And so it's just, you're still getting a lot of tremendous benefit, you know, you're building muscle, but at the same time, the risk goes down a bit. Yeah. Trap bar is a good one. And then unilateral work is another one that everybody gets value from, but the longer you've been working out or the longer that you might have been training a not perfect recruitment pattern, the more valuable, you know, lateral work becomes, right? So when I'm lifting a barbell overhead, I may not notice a 2% difference in strength or stability between my right and left. You're probably not going to notice at all. In fact, it'll look really good. Now remember, consider over years and years of doing that, you may start to develop some issues and not really know what's going on. You switch to dumbbells where you go in one at a time, not both at the same time, but one at a time and you watch your technique, it'll become much more apparent, which side needs a little bit more work, then you use the weak side as your guide, and then they start to catch up. And this is like, this is like, how to avoid or prevent injury 101. Well, even I actually think even just dumbbell work in general has its benefits, right? Even, I mean unilateral for sure, but even just doing dumbbell work in replace of some barbell movements, I think of tremendous value too. A lot of times when I would be hammering the weights really hard and my joints start talking to me, one of the easiest transitions would be like, you know what, I'm going to sub out the barbell bench press is going to go to dumbbell bench press. And instead of the barbell bent over rows, I'm going to do dumbbell row. And those things always tend to help me out. Totally. Now this next one focuses on sleep. Now sleep, there's almost nothing that will negatively impact your health as quickly as poor sleep. In fact, you can make a good chunk of people literally become clinically insane by taking sleep away for less than a week. Okay. It's a, it has profound impacts on your hormones. It has profound impacts on cravings, on attitude, depression, anxiety. It's a big one. Now there's a lot of things you could do to improve your sleep, but one particular factor, one particular action has a huge, huge impact. So, and I like that. I like like single steps that have a big carryover versus a lot of steps that have a little carryover. And that one, the one I'm referring to is to go to bed at the same time every night and wake up at the same time every morning. Now why, why is that so important? Well, most people pick a bedtime that they're consistent with Monday through Thursday because they work Monday through Friday. But then Friday comes around, they like to stay up late because they get to sleep in Saturday morning and then they do it against Saturday because they get to sleep in Sunday morning. Well, what you've essentially done over two days is you've shifted your circadian rhythm. So then come Monday, when you need to wake up at the normal time, you're now jet lagged. Look at the data on jet lag. Look at the data on shift work and you'll find profound negative impacts on health. So this one's simple. It's really simple. Forget everything else. Like, you know, I go to bed at 930, I wake up at 5am or I go to bed at 10 and I wake up at 6 or whatever, set those times, keep them as consistent as possible. That alone will have a huge impact positively. We recently had Dr. Parsley in the studio and he said something and we were talking about sleep. Sleep was something that he talks a lot about, right? Working with Navy SEALs and stuff. This is an area that he's always drilling home to them and something that I don't think I've ever given his advice before to a client or even sit on this podcast. And I don't know why, but we do talk about the importance of treating the night the same way you treat your morning with like a routine, right? And I never thought about like the value of actually potentially having two alarm clocks and that you have one that's like set for the evening. And really what that is about is just because we all know how it can get where you're caught up at, you know, having a conversation with your wife or doing some of the kids or maybe you're into a movie or you're binging something or whatever, reading an article or you're whatever and you lose track of the time. Just simply having a clock that you hear go off in your room. It's like, and you're like, oh, shit. It's like. I have an hour before. Yeah, we'll trigger that. Oh, this is where I now. OK, now go over to the lights, dim the lights or shut them off or throw the blue blockers on or where. I think that's a really smart strategy for someone who's trying to create that consistency on because we all are pretty consistent with the time we get up with. Most people have jobs, so you don't have a choice. You've got to be at your job by seven or eight in the morning. So that's real easy. That's consistent. It's the going to bed part that everybody tends to fail fail at being consistent with. And so the idea of actually having an alarm that goes off as a reminder of, oh, this is this triggers me to now set all these things up that I want to do for my time. The next one is in the morning when you take your shower to finish the shower with a cold rinse. And you can. This is very individual of how long you would do it, but typically would start with like 15 seconds cold, cold water, move your way up to maybe doing a minute or two minute over time. Now, what's the benefit of this? Well, it's been shown to boost immune system. It's been shown to have anti inflammatory effects, but really the main value of a cold rinse is it does energize you and set the stage for the rest of the day. Cold water boosts catacolamine production, nor epinephrine, epinephrine, these kind of get going type of chemicals. It'll probably or could potentially reduce your dependence on caffeine and just put you in that better mood. In fact, studies on cold water immersion show them to be quite effective as anti anxiety, anti depressants. So starting your day off every morning with a little cold rinse at the end of your shower sounds silly, but it has a lot of impacts on the rest of your day, really. So a lot of times people look at this one thing and say, well, what does that one thing do? But really, it's how it affects everything else. It's like having your coffee in the morning. How is how does that caffeine affect you for the rest of the day versus not having it? Same thing with the cold rinse in the morning, very simple. Most people now, if you have been paying attention and to the fitness space at all, have seen all the information. The Huberman talks about it, Rogan talks about it. It's all over every fitness person's Instagram is cold, plunge, cold, plunge, cold, plunge is everywhere. And this is just an easy way to reap a big part of those benefits without buying a seven thousand dollar tub or getting a bunch of ice every time and making this into a whole ordeal. Sure, you it's going to be more beneficial to sit for three to five minutes inside a tub and immerse yourself. But there's a ton of benefits just simply from. Especially if you do it daily. Plus to introduce it, you know, like that's the other thing, too, is because you can really just kind of gradually taper that. Like I remember going through that process with the shower was a lot easier and controlled because you can start warm and kind of like slowly bring yourself into the world. But then, you know, intentionally start turning that temperature down, down, down. And you can kind of feel how that feels and go all the way to the point where I started to do that. And it would be like a 10 minutes. And and rinse off at the end. And it was like, you're just alive and alert. One of the things I love about this one, too, is it's one of those things that I've never taught somebody this or introduced it to somebody who's done it for just a few days and not instantly seen the benefit. Like you've the first time you do it. It may feel miserable or hard or uncomfortable to do it the first time. But the feeling that you have afterwards is it's undeniable. But you instantly you feel. I mean, I feel and I've told you as this when I get consistent with the plunge, like there's no amount of caffeine I can take that even equates to the same type of feeling. Totally different experience. It gives me all that and some. Like so once you get somebody to actually implement this and just like you guys said, you you start off with, you know, 15 seconds for a week, then you go to 30 seconds, then you go to 45 seconds, then you go to a minute. And then before you know it, you can sit in there for five or 10 minutes with a culture or get to a point where you don't even know some. Yeah, I know I know some clients that have like seen the benefits, loved it so much, got adapted so much to it that they no longer even have to use hot water. That's right. Next is to eat a high protein diet. All right. So what's high protein? About a gram of protein per pound of target body weight. So if your goal is to weigh 150 pounds, aim for 150 grams of protein. Now, this one's really interesting because across the board, it's got benefits, whether you want to build muscle or burn body fat or control your appetite or control your blood sugar. It benefits all of those things. So when they have studies where people eat the same calories, one of them being the high protein category. Like I said, the other one being in a lower protein category, even though the calories are the same, the high protein group loses more body fat, builds more muscle, which is wild. Then satiety is a big one. Also, it controls your appetite. And then blood sugar is another one you eat, especially a high protein breakfast. Regardless of what you eat later on in the day, if you didn't have the high protein breakfast, you would see more wild ups and downs with blood sugar versus when you do have the protein breakfast or high protein breakfast, where things seem a lot flat. And that has big impacts on your mood and how you feel. High protein, for the most part, for most people, let's say digestive issues become an issue, which is not super common with protein sources. This one's a big one when it comes to just being more fit, stronger and healthier. The reason why I think this is such a powerful tip for 40 plus, because it's a good tip for any age. But why I think it's so powerful at 40 is one of the things that I noticed with clients that and these are people that are more health conscious, right? People that are trying to stay fit, exercise, make good food choices. They're not 100 plus pounds overweight. What they've done over time, my dad's an example of this. My mom's example of this. Katrina's mom is an example of this. My sister-in-law is an example of this. My brother-in-law is an example of this. They, and these are all 40, 50, 60-year-olds, they have over time moved less and less and ate less and less and less. And so they've actually got adapted to eating one or two meals a day. And they're so grossly under eating protein that when you start to get them into exercise, them eating two or three meals a day doesn't even get them close, remotely close to what the RDA is for protein, much less the optimal level for them to build muscle. And those benefits of speeding the metabolism of burning body fat, building more muscle, sculpting your physique, they're compounding when you're coupling the training and all these other things we're talking about with hitting your protein targets. And I found that the older my clients are, the less likely they are to even get close to their protein intake. So even though this is a tip that I'd give to somebody, no matter what their age is, I find it's even more crucial for my clients that are for you. In fact, average personal listening right now, if you just hit one gram of protein per pound of target body weight and prioritize that, you wouldn't have to even try and cut your calories. Most people lose weight just doing that alone because it makes you eat less. And because, like we said, there seems to be a fat burning effect from the metabolism boost that comes from it. The next one is to aim for about a half a gallon to a gallon of water every single day. OK, so people are like, well, that's too much water. There is an amount of water that you need in order to not get sick or suffer certain consequences. But then there's an amount of water that's considered optimal. And it's more than what they typically recommend. And it's also more than what you probably drink. So aiming for this in my experience with clients, I mean, this is like clockwork. If I get a client to drink this much water, they typically have less inflammation. They feel better, have more energy, burn more body fat. Just overall just feel better. All downstream effects that are beneficial. That's it. Just from doing this right here. Now you want to make sure it's spring water or you have some electrolytes because you can drink too much water and throw off your electrolyte balance. But that's it. And it's not a hard one. And so I recommend people do is get themselves a big bottle or thermos that, you know, where you could easily count and say, OK, three. I drink three of these. That lets me hit my target. It's also kind of like the protein tip by having them focus on something, on adding something. It naturally gets rid of something that's not ideal. It's something else. Yeah, it always this all this tip. If I if I never if I have my clients again in my my older clients that have been training with me and I go, I'm not going to tell them they can't have their wine. I'm not going to tell them not to have that soda at dinner every once in a while. I'm not going to tell them that they can't have that, you know, that coffee frappuccino with that. What I'm going to say instead is you've got to hit this gallon of water every day. And if I just drill that home, what ends up happening is they're so focused on hitting that that amount of water that it just naturally weans all that stuff off. And it's such a and again, we talk about this a lot with the importance of the psychology around telling yourself that you can't how it naturally your body wants to rebel. And so instead of saying, oh, I can't have this wine or I can't ever have that soda or I can't do these things. It's like, no, my goal is I'm going to hit a gallon of water every single day. And then you just focused on that. And what you start to find out is like, man, when you allow that frappuccino in there, that glass of wine in that soda in there, it makes it almost impossible for you to hit the water target. And so instead, you're like, you're so focused on getting the water that it just kind of naturally sounds silly, but it's 100 percent. Yeah, I mean, 100 percent. All right. The next one, no social media or news for the first 90 minutes after you wake up. OK, so what does this have to do with getting more fit or whatever? Yeah, the way you start your day frames the rest of your day. There are studies that show this. OK, social media and news is designed to get your attention as effectively as possible. What has been shown to get your attention are things that scare you are things that make you stressed out, that shock you. And then, of course, sex cells, right? So those are the four big things. If you start your day off that way, let's just start with the first three, the big ones, right, which you'll find all over social media, right? It the fear, anxiety, worry. How do you think that's going to affect your eating habits? How do you how do you think that's going to affect your how you feel about the workout you're going to do later in the day or your job or the people you interact with? This actually leads to better eating habits. People not starting their day off with stress and worry. Look, it's a this is not controversial. Being anxious and worried and stressed out. Your body perceives this as a famine, ramp up appetite, store calories. And we know this when people are stressed out at first, they may eat less, but then eventually they start to eat more as they start to medicate. So social media and I don't need to make this argument anymore. I think people know that social media can largely be toxic. You just avoid it for the first 90 minutes. And you know what, people are, well, what I do instead, either nothing or replace it with something positive affirmations or, you know, philosophy or something that starts the day off in the right way. And it does have effects that last. Because it's all mindset. And then you create that in that first opportunity when you wake up. And I mean, I've been living by this for quite some time now. I made a humongous difference. I mean, the other part to this that we don't really describe is, you know, not having it near the bed anymore for me too. And that was a big game changer. But that's that's really overall like that sleep ritual that you're going to create to improve on the deep sleep. I think it was our friend, Jordan Syat, that did a really cool, like 30 day test where he was measuring his blood pressure every single day. And I think the thing to what started the 30 day challenge, if I recall, I had to go back and look at his stuff, but it was a really cool thing he did. And I think it was related to sugar, right? Like he was saying that like sugar doesn't make us fat. Like I'm going to show you how I'm going to eat something sugary or sweet every single day and still lose lose weight. And I'm going to measure my blood pressure also and all of that. And actually what he had found during that process was that the social media and taking the social media had like a larger impact on his his blood pressure than almost anything else. And so that just shows you how powerful something like that is. And I can't imagine starting that off in the daytime has to be one of the worst times that you could possibly do that, aside from just setting the tone for the day. Plus you just went from sleeping to awake and now fear, fear, fear, anxiety, anxiety, anger, anger, anger. The first thing you're driven towards. It sounds silly, but it makes a big difference. The next one is practicing gratitude before you go to bed. All right. Why is this, why is this so, so important? When you think about the day you just had and you focus on what you're grateful for, you actually reframe what just happened. You actually can look back and paint a little bit of a different picture. Now this is going to feel hard at first because you might have had a tough day and you might look back and be like, what am I grateful for? But you'll find something and it may be just, you know what? That was a tough day, but I got through it. You know what I just did with something silly like that? I just reframed the tough day as something that I survived and made it through. Now I feel good about that type of deal. It's a silly sounding practice, but this is why every spiritual practice probably has people pray before they go to sleep. It literally has those profound effects because it reframes what just happened. So I love this idea of combining number two, the one you just listed, and then the next one, number eight, which is the box breathing before sleep. And combining all those with the alarm idea that Dr. Parsley was talking about, I think this would be such a great, and again, this is not something I've had the opportunity to actually implement with my clients and I wish I had thought of the alarm thing first because this is how I would have them do it. I would literally agree, find out what we can agree upon, what's a reasonable time that they can consistently go to bed. Let's say that's 9 30 or 10 PM for somebody. And I say, okay, an hour before that is when we're going to set your alarm. When that alarm goes off, these are the things I want you to do. You know, turn down the lights, you're going to do the gratitude and then you're going to do some box breathing. And I think just the combination of setting the alarm, you have this intention of what you're going to, these, these steps that you're going to do, even if you don't lay, get right in bed and fall right to sleep right there, just doing those things will start to prepare your mind, prepare your body to actually get a better night's rest. I would think that that would be one of the more powerful things you do. And again, I think it's good tips or ideas for any age, but man, as we get older with more stuff, more stress, and I think we're more sensitive to a lot of that stress, it becomes even more important to nail this part down. You mentioned box breathing. So box breathing is where you, you breathe in slowly, you hold your breath, you breathe out slowly, you hold your breath and repeat. It's typically five seconds, right? So it's five second breath in real deep, five second hold, five second breath out, five second hold and repeat. Okay. So what's so big about this, what you're doing is you're actually forcing a parasympathetic state in the body. You, if your body is sympathetic, it means fight or flight, parasympathetic is rest and digest or relax. And when you box, breathe, and especially if you do this, you just lay in bed and you just do this over and over again. Here's what we end up finding. You'll do this and then you'll fall asleep. You'll actually do this and then I realize that, oh, I'm asleep. This is a strategy for people with anxiety attacks, panic attacks, stressful events. You're going to go speak in public, whatever. It literally forces, it tells your body, because your body may feel anxious because of something. But then when you breathe this way, your body's getting the signal like, well, there's no reason to be stressed out. And all those nice relaxing chemicals start to get released and the stressful ones start to go down. And then you start to feel it. You start to feel how it works. Heart rate slows way down. You just get in just an overall feeling of relaxation. It comes on a lot more effectively that way. I do this quite a bit too, just, and then breathing in through my nose and trying to get as big a breath as possible and get my, everything to expand, you know, and slowly exhale out through my mouth. But it's just like, it's so effective because a lot of times you're just, you just bring all of the day's events and all the conversations and just like anything that's going to, you're going to be anxious about for the next day, you're just focusing on what you're doing breath wise. It sort of alleviates all that. Well, this is why I love to pair these two, too. One of them is addressing the physiological things going on with your body with the box brain. The other one's doing the psychological and the mental side with the gratitude, right? We've talked about this before, like if you're anxious and you have a lot of anxiety and if that's going on and then you switch over to gratitude, the brain can't focus on both of them at the same time. You can't be grateful and stressed out at the same time. That's right. So what you do is you address the psychological part by switching over, forcing the brain to move in another direction. That'll relieve the psychological part. Then the breathing part will address the physiological, the combination of two of those very, very powerful for relaxing somebody before. By the way, all these ones that we're talking about are our skills. So you have to practice them. That's right. You might suck at the beginning. Yes. Yeah. Because I know because people will try and be like, well, it sucked. Like I wasn't, you know, you got to practice it and you'll get better at them over time. Next, OK, so one of the most unhealthy things that people do is sit a lot. We now have data that shows that sitting for hours a day, like most people do, has more negative effects on us than even diet and smoking things like cigarettes. OK, that's how bad it is for you. We also have data, though, that shows that if you got up and moved for five minutes for every hour that you sat, that's it. Literally five minutes for every hour, you erase a lot of that damage. So if you work at a desk in front of a computer, you're sitting all day, you could literally have a little timer that goes off, or just at the hour, every hour is what I would do. And I'd look up at the clock, oh, it's 2 o'clock, get up. And it's a five minute walk. You can walk to the bathroom. You can walk to get some water. You can stand up and work while you're working, whatever. And those little five minute walk, think about it this way. You're at work for seven hours, OK? You get up and walk for five minutes every hour. You've just done a 35 minute walk, 35 minutes worth of exercise and movement while you were there. And you didn't need to change into your gym clothes. You didn't need to go to the gym. You probably just walked around your office and maybe even greeted some of your coworkers or whatever. But this has profound effects. And it's super, super easy to do. I have an alternative to that that I like even more. And you can toggle between the two or you can choose what is more beneficial for you. But I really adopted this in the last 10 years. And that was when I really started to focus on the mobility. And so because you're already trying to practice this movement every hour, or at least after meals, and you're trying to incorporate that in this very sedentary day. And almost all of us have some sort of imbalance going on, whether it be poor ankle mobility, poor hip mobility, poor shoulder mobility. Like my favorite thing to do would be to get down into that squatted position and work on my ankle mobility. So I would spend that five minutes doing combat stretch or get down and do the 90, 90 real quick. So I get the benefits of moving the calorie burn like that. The blood, the circulation, and it's more intentional. Now I'm not just aimlessly walking. Now I'm actually working on correcting something that I have issues that's causing chronic pain. And that's one of the harder things for people to do is to discipline themselves to habitually work on those mobility drills every single day. And so if I pair it with this idea of, oh, I'm also trying to work on digestion and move more and just be more active because I'm sedentary. I'm not gonna just get up and walk aimlessly. I'm actually gonna get up. Maybe I'm gonna walk for a little bit, but then I'm gonna get down and I'm gonna do my combat stretch real quick. Or I'm gonna get down and do 90, 90 on both sides and then get back to my work and go back. Like that's been extremely beneficial. I know when I was going through that, people would kind of tease me and say that, oh, Adam's like flexing his newfound mobility. Like, remember that? I'd be always squatting down in that position. And like, it wasn't that. I wasn't showing off that I had this new range of motion. It was like, I was trying to create that and turn that into a habit. And it has become a habit now where it's second nature now. When I'm just, sometimes you'll catch me doing it. I'm standing in line or I'm waiting somewhere and I'll just pop down in that squatted position. And while I'm down there, I'm driving my knees forward. I'm getting connected with my feet to the ground and I'm working on mobility stuff. Yeah, that's great. The last one has to do with diet, but it's one thing that people never consider when they're looking at their diet. People consider things like calories, maybe if they're a little bit more sophisticated macros. But the next thing I'm gonna say is probably the number one thing you should consider. And that is to pick foods that you can digest easily. Foods with poor digestibility, which there's a large individual variance. So some foods are gonna bother you and other foods might not. And then your friend might have the complete opposite issue. Foods that cause digestive issues cause inflammation. They can cause systemic inflammation. They can cause stress hormones to go up. They can affect anabolic hormones and make them go down. They can affect cravings. They can affect your mood. Okay, this is all backed by lots of data. You can over time cause something called leaky gut syndrome where, and a lot of people have this by the way, it's not rare, where you've chronically eaten things that have caused inflammation to the point where now your gut leaks, you know, nutrients or proteins when it's not supposed to, your body then develops an immune response to those foods. So now the foods that you ate before that didn't bother you now all of a sudden, you can't digest anymore. If that's resonating, if that's you, if you're listening and saying, you know I see eggs every morning, now when I eat eggs I get terrible bloat or digestive issues. Probably the result of leaky gut syndrome and probably, which was probably the result of you ignoring some of the bloat and digestive issues that certain foods gave you and you just continue to eat them. So when you're choosing your list of foods to eat and you know, calories and macros are important, right? Proteins, fats and carbs are important. At the top should be what foods do I digest the best? In fact, that's the first list I would make is I would have a list, what are the foods that I can eat and just feel like it just digest super easily. And then from there, I would pick my carbs, my proteins and my fats. That's a big one that people simply don't pay attention to. Yeah, I think that's, again, this is where these new tests and I think going through that process of figuring out which foods are actually benefiting you and your digestion and which ones, maybe a bit of an offender. It's like, it's just good data points so that way too, that it might just mean you need to lower the overall volume and amount that you're eating per day just to give your body a chance to really like effectively digest it. Also too, with the timing of it, for me it was, I had to stop eating around seven o'clock or it was gonna be a problem because it was gonna interrupt my sleep. And so just those considerations, once you kind of really get better insight into how your body's reacting to the way that your eating habits tend to go, you can alter just little things and make a massive difference. I've always felt like the adherence for my 40 plus on this stuff is much easier than it was with my clients that were 20. Of course. Because if, when you're 20 something years old, you're gonna blissfully ignore it. Yeah, and I think that's what it is, right? When you're 20 something years old. You're also just more wise, you know? You think that nothing is affecting your gut, you think that's just normal, it's normal stool behavior. And you just don't think about any of that, you don't recognize bloat, you're like whatever. Well, I think when you're 45, you've had enough of those times happen. Yes, you've put, all right, that's an issue. You've connected the dots. As much as I love pizza, every time I do, it just wrecks me. It's just not worth it anymore. But those are the extreme cases, you know? It's important to notice to the ones that aren't extremely. Well, I also, so why I think I've always had good adherence with my 40 plus is I think by that time, most of them have connected a lot of the dots on the foods that are these offenders. What I don't think they realize is how much it can be stalling their progress. And then when I educate them on that and inform them like- They're huge roadblocks. Yeah, that how much that, man, you are prioritizing your gut and your digestive system trying to recover from that. It's not being prioritized over into burning fat or building muscle like you would like. And so, man, if we could just eliminate some of these choices and really focus on foods that are more digestible, you would also accelerate your results. That normally gets buy-in from them. They're like, okay, I got you now. Here's what a lot of people don't understand, right? The gut is a barrier between you and the outside world. Now you think, what do you mean? It's inside my body. No, no, imagine your body is like a tube. The inside of the tube is not inside the tube. It's still outside the tube, right? You have to go inside what actually makes up the tube. Well, when you put something in your mouth, it's still not in your body until it goes through the gut and gets absorbed. Now, because we can't see it, we could just feel it. We tend to like, ah, you know, yeah, I get bloating. Yeah, I get digestion. Yeah, I get constipation. Yeah, I got diarrhea. Yeah, I get, you know, heartburn or whatever. If it was on the outside of our body, like our skin, we would know right away. Like imagine if you walked around with big sores on your body constantly. Imagine what would happen when you would touch dirt or bacteria or anything else outside. All of a sudden, those things can go through those sores and can affect you quite easily versus when you have good, healthy skin, you've got this nice, healthy barrier. That's what happens to your gut as well. So the inside of your gut, as it becomes inflamed over time, everything you put in your mouth now can permeate and penetrate where it's not supposed to because although the gut is the outside of the body still, it's a very intelligent membrane that allows things in when they're supposed to and doesn't allow things in when they're not supposed to go through, but when it's inflamed, that's all haywire. Man, look at that guy's backup, you know? 100% it's a gross thought. Now, look, if you're looking for something designed specifically for you because you're over 40, that includes a workout program, okay? That includes sets, reps and exercises and how to implement them. That has lifestyle hacks, that has sleep hacks, that has dietary and supplement strategies. We've put out a new program called Maps 40 Plus. And if you're listening to this episode, when we drop it, you're in luck because you're still in the launch phase, which means it's on sale. So you can go to maps40plus.com. So maps40plus.com, use the code 40Launch and get $80 off the retail price. Plus, we throw in two free eBooks, the guide to balancing hormones and the four phase histamine reset plan. So go check it out. You can also find all of us on social media. Justin is on Instagram at Mind Pump. Justin, I'm on Instagram at Mind Pump to Stefano. And Adam is on Instagram at Mind Pump Atom.