The Brave Athlete: Calm the F*ck Down and Rise to the Occasion

Daddy. At least that's what they say over here in Estonia. This is Ben Greenfield. I'm in Estonia. I'm actually living in Estonia for the next several weeks. My children are going to a little international university over here called Mindvalley U. And I'm also speaking at this mindvalleyu event. So, Tallinn, Europe. I'm eating elk sausages and drinking meat soup and toasting folks with honey mead and spiced wine. I'm living like a knight, basically. Literally. I'm learning how to sword fight and juggle puppets and all sorts of things that they did back in the medieval days to make humans great. Anyways, speaking of making humans great, today's podcast is with the authors of a fantastic book that I read last month about forming an identity for yourself as an athlete or as a competitor or as anyone who has a lot on the line when it comes to stress, physical stress, mental stress, et cetera. These folks wrote a great book. We will unveil the title of the book shortly and you can check out the show notes for everything that we talk about today. And I will also give you the URL for the show notes during today's episode. Decided it'll be all mysterious. This podcast is brought to you by Kion Flex. Flex is a blend of cherry juice, ginger, turmeric, white willow bark, hyaluronic acid, boswellia, mineral whey concentrate, and also what are called proteolytic enzymes like protease and bromelain and papain. What do all of these do when you blend them together? Well, essentially, rather than choosing one single enzyme or one single nutrient to support your joint health or to lower inflammation post workout or to help you bounce back faster after you've been injured, I decided to put them all together in one single shotgun formula and it's called Keon Flex. It's for mobility, it's for flexibility, it's for recovery. I pop about 12 a day when I'm injured and I'll take four to six a day for just general joint maintenance. So it's called Keon Flex. Deal is you get 10% off your first order of Keon Flex. Very simple. Here's the code for that. It's Ben Flex 10 Ben Flex 10. And you just go to getkeon.com so Ben Flex tenetkion.com this podcast is also brought to you by Onnit on it and they have a pretty handy brand new elk bar. It's uncured bacon and bison blended with elk. Now, as a guy who bow hunts for elk and enjoys me some delicious elk meat. I can tell you elk is not only some of the most, most flavorful, but some of the most. It gives you this strange energy you don't get from other foods. It's extremely high in B vitamins, iron, zinc. The flavor, I think is better than beef, it's better than chicken. And they've blended this bar with other meats to make it a pretty majestic bar from a majestic animal. The elk protein bar is just one of the many functional foods and amazing supplements and fitness gear that you can get over at Onnit. Just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Onit BenGreenfieldFitness.com O N N I T and you'll instantly save 10%. In this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness Show, Everyone here talks about how awesome they are, even although they're not. So I was like, you know, maybe there's something in this. Maybe if I actually start talking like I'm good, I can believe that I'm good and it really works.

You're then saying, okay, if this does happen, he came up with a plan for every single one of them. And it doesn't matter that the likelihood of these things happening might be quite small. It's the fact that no matter what happens, I've got this. And that is such a huge part of having the mindset to give an optimal performance. He's an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America's top personal trainer and.

One of the globe's most influential people in health and fitness.

His show provides you with everything you.

Need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield. Power.

Speed, mobility, balance, whatever it is for you, that's the natural movement. Get out there. When you look at all the studies done, studies that have shown the greatest efficacy.

All the information you need in one place right here, right now on.

The Ben Green Fitness Podcast.

Hey, folks, it's Ben Greenfield. And it is high time that we get to dig into yet another one of the relatively more dog eared books that's on my bookshelf right now. It's one of those titles that I folded over and I highlighted and I scribbled in profusely because it, it spoke to me quite a bit as an athlete, as a guy who has been competing in everything from triathlons to marathons to Spartan races to all sorts of crazy competitions for the past couple of decades. I've been through a lot of these mental conundrums that, that athletes and, you know, active exercise enthusiasts face in Training and in races, things like, you know, everything from, you know, am I too fat and do I weigh too much? Which sounds dumb, you know, coming from, for me as a super lean guy. But, you know, I know athletes and even myself, we've struggled with thoughts such as that. The issue with injuries, like what do you do when you get injured and your entire identity is wrapped around being an athlete and all of a sudden you can't scratch that itch or you know, for me, kind of relevant. Just, just recently, just a couple of days ago, I got my, my ass handed to me in a bo hunting competition and I left the competition just like questioning whether or not I was even in the right sport or whether or not that was even something that I should be doing and how should I mentally deal with that? Well, this book called the Brave Athlete Calm the F Down and Rise to the Occasion actually delves into a whole bunch of these mental conundrums. And it's actually super practical, actionable advice. It's not one of those woo woo self help books. It's actually really good. And it was written by a guy named Dr. Simon Marshall and his wife, Leslie Patterson. And Leslie, I think I actually first became familiar with her back when I was competing in Ironman and she was kind of known as the foul mouth Scots woman who came to these races and just kicked ass and took names and turns out that she went on to pull on her big girl pants and actually write a book. So that's Leslie and then Dr. Simon Marshall. He is formerly a professor of medicine at UC San Diego and professor of exercise science at San Diego State University. And he has a whole bunch of scientific articles on the psychology of exercise. And he is the performance psychologist for a bunch of professional, particularly endurance athlete teams like the BMC racing team and the World Tour professional cycling team. And so together they make one pretty badass couple. So, Dr. Simon and Leslie, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for having us on. We're, we're, we're stoked to have this conversation with you.

Thanks, Ben. I was just, I was just shocked when I heard bow hunting contest. I was. That had me.

Yeah, those exist, believe it or not. They're actually pretty fun. It's like obstacle course racing with a weapon. You run around the trees and, you know, carry sandbags and do burpees and stand up and shoot and it's a hoot. It's a lot of fun. But unfortunately.

I didn't do so well in my last competition.

That's all right. We can help.

How'd it work doing this book together as a husband, wife, team. What made you guys want to do this?

We argued profusely and it was awful. No, actually it was a really natural thing for us to be honest, because I've been in the Sport now for 25 years and came up through the ranks as a junior and really struggled mentally with this sport and my identity in the sport. Had always wanted to go to the Olympics, didn't make it, had a big fat failure. And it really struggled with the coaches and how they approached me. On the British national team specifically, everything was driven by data points and they didn't know how to talk to me. You know, it was, you're too fat, you're not good enough. And I left the sport at the ripe old age of 20 and it just totally disillusioned. So when I met Sai, of course, a sports psychologist, that's obviously when I gave the sport up, because that's how good he is. But when I met Simon, you know, I think just having that sort of sports psychology background that he did. When I came back to the sport the second time, I was going through this rebirth as an athlete and was discovering all of these new ways to be and sort of realized that this had to be my journey. And so what would happen, I would come home every day from, from my training and express to Simon, you know, hey, listen, this is what I'm going through, this is what I dealt with today. And he would get into the nitty gritty of the science. And so it was really kind of a fun journey that we both went on. And then when we started our own coaching business, we were going on all of these journeys with our athletes too. And realizing that all of these people had similar thoughts and feelings that they didn't want and we needed to come up with some kind of actionable thing to help them moving forward.

And what's interesting here as well, I think that the story, you know, I came as a, as a cyclist, that's how we met actually, in university and then sort of moved into sports science when I figured I was too mediocre to have any life in the actual sport itself. But what's interesting is that most coaches, we tend to sort of behead the athlete.

Right.

It's a kind of a bit of a black box up there, that three pound lump that we don't really know that there's sort of awkward stuff going in there. A lot of it is, oh, I don't really want to get into that. It's not my role I'm just a coach. And. And when you look at coach education programs in particular, you see the role of psychology in the curricula. It's usually, you know, relegated to a handful of PowerPoint slides about visualization and goal setting. And then they're not really opening up the sort of the scope of how significant and how important it is, mindset decisions that we make, thoughts and things that we have, and how that really is a great entry point to talk about all the other aspects of your sport performance as well. You know, it's funny because sports scientists, I always remember this as an undergraduate in my sports science degree, you look at the pie chart of the ingredients of successful performances, then the nutritional and tactical and technical and physical, and psychology is one of the slices of the pie. And I think that that's unfortunate because that implies that it's sort of. Oh, it's part of it, but it doesn't really overlap any of the others. And if I don't have the skills or expertise or comfort in talking about that sort of stuff, that aspect, then I just kind of leave it well alone. And. And really what we found on our journey together, it's the lens with which you look through everything from how you communicate to how you get people out of slumps and plateaus to finding their own identity. So it becomes a lot of a bigger piece than most people think.

Yeah, you've already used the word identity a few times. And that's one of the things that. That was. One of the first pages I folded over in the book was you. You talked about what actually puts together a complete athlete identity, or what you call mature athlete identity. And what I'm curious about is why you came up with this idea of having an athlete identity and what goes into actually having a mature athlete identity and what an immature athlete identity would be.

Yeah, you know, identity is a big topic in psychology in general and not just about sport or, you know, the role that you play in activity. So there's been a lot of work and research on identity, what it is and what constitutes a healthy identity, and when does an identity become problematic. And so in the sport literature, in the sports psychology literature especially, identity, we think of it as athletic identity is how you think and feel like an athlete. Right. How the extent to which not you just identify internally, but how other people see you as well. And there's a little, almost like an audit that you can do of your own identity. It's a little sort of series of questions that you can ask yourself about how mature your Identity. And we don't use the word strong and weak for identity because some people do, but we don't like that because strong implies that more is always better. And folks who have, they become sort of one dimensional balls, you know, that's all they do, their friends, their pastimes, everything they think and breathe about is that one thing. And there's reasons why that's quite dangerous to your sense of self, your self concept. So an identity is really, for example, things about you. Okay, you're comfortable being called an athlete by other people or you're comfortable calling yourself an athlete. And it's not just whether you also participate in sport, it is independent of how fast you are, how much training that you do, but for example, that you own your athletic ability, you're not embarrassed by it, you don't feel the need to prove it to others. You don't sort of engage in an excessive self criticism or telling other people how great you are. You have emotional reactions that most people would consider reasonable when stuff goes wrong, losing or failing or getting penalized or so on. And you've got a balance in your life between that part and other aspects of it. So all of these things form your athletic identity. And a strong is when you can say yes, mature is when you can say yes, that is me, that is how I operate or how I think about myself. And when we talk to athletes and one of the hallmarks of someone with identity issues going on is that they might say to themselves or to us, oh, I'm justa, you know, a case of the justers. So they don't really see themselves of excusing their athletic identity off the bat. And so, so that is a little entry point to talk about how they see themselves. And we get into this sort of more detailed work which we call self schema. Only psychologists could come up with a name like that. But so that's the essence of it.

Okay, so in other words, and this is something that I've thought about a lot before, like when I was a triathlete, I sucked as a runner, like my first six years because I was a tennis player in college and my idea of a run was maybe 500 yards and for me to run a mile. You know, I actually remember when I was first, you know, back when I was training for tennis. Venus Williams was one of the players who I really respected. And I read a fitness interview with Venus and she talks about how her coach had her avoid running any longer than a mile so that she didn't develop too much slow Twitch muscle. And so she. That she maintained a lot of that fast twitch type 2 muscle fiber capacity that she needed for power and explosiveness. And so, you know, I would, I would read articles like that for tennis and really focus more on powerlifting and weightlifting and short explosive training activities, which, which seemed to really enhance my game more than, say, going out for a long run. But then when I got into triathlon, I was fueled by this mindset that although I felt pretty strong swimming and I felt pretty strong cycling, I would go into races for the longest time thinking, well, I'm not really a runner. Like, I'm just going to hang on for that, that final discipline. And what, what really spoke to me in this part of the book was that you must get to the point where you develop that athletic identity that says, you know, whatever, I am a runner, I am a bow hunter.

I am a CrossFit athlete. You know, those things that rather than make you question your skills because you're not actually telling yourself that that's your identity, you actually form your entire identity around defining yourself as being what you want to be. Is it kind of like a fake it till you make it type of approach?

Well, you know, to a certain extent, but there's still strategy behind that. It's not just pretending. So, for example, you know, I was doing ITU racing, the format of triathlon, where swimming is very, very important, you know, to get into the Olympics. And I was always told, you're not a swimmer, you're not a, you're not any good. And I ended up doing a lot of things, like surrounding myself by swimmers, going in and doing swimming events only, going to swim clubs only, not triathletes, and kind of building confidence through that. But also as well, interestingly enough, I had the same issues as you, Ben. When I first moved here to California from Scotland and I got competing again after some retirement, I did feel I had the right to call myself a professional. I was so embarrassed to say I'm a. Because I wasn't really earning any money. You know, I was concerned about what people thought of me. And interestingly, coming to California really, really helped me because everyone here talks about how awesome they are, even although they're not. So I was like, you know, maybe there's something in this. Maybe if I actually start talking like I'm good, I can believe that I'm good. And it really worked. I started to call myself a professional athlete. I would go along into groups of other professional athletes and talk to them and start to become part of that fold and really adopt behaviors instead of always saying, no, no, no, I'm not really that, or oh no, I'm not a good runner, actually change the dialogue, that narrative that you're playing in your head. I would start to look at things like photographs, look at video games to kind of inspire me, how did you know? And this will come. And we'll probably chat more about this later about developing an alter ego, but you know, looking at other professional athletes and how they would hold themselves, how they would talk about themselves, and bit by bit I started to adopt those behaviors myself. And that translated into better performance because I was committed and I wasn't embarrassed anymore to give it a go. And I think a lot of that comes down to fear of failure. You know, I mean, what people are scared to commit because if you truly commit to something, say for example, you really committing to, you know what, I'm going to become a runner this year, and you put all your cards on the table and it still doesn't work out, what does that say about you? And that sort of then reflects back on your own sort of ego and sense of self and self confidence and self worth and all of those deeper, darker issues that we also delve into in the book as well.

Yeah, that's, that's exactly what I did when I began to form my athlete identity as a runner. I actually became a really good runner in triathlon. Turned into one of my, my stronger skills was I used kind of the approach that you did to where I would go to 5Ks and 10Ks and trail races and just jumped into and, and began to specialize, especially in the off season at running and hang out with runners, you know, and it's as much fun as that is, let me tell you. It's a blast hanging out with a bunch of runners.

Spandex clad, type A orthorexic runners. But anyways, like, that was one of the ways that I, that I really formed my identity around being a runner. But you guys kind of systematized identities with this whole concept of a self schema. Like on, on page 31 in the book, you have almost like this diagram of how to, how to systematize this process of building your identity. And Simon, you even dropped that bomb earlier. This word self schema. Can you go into what that is and how someone can form their identity using this self schema process?

Exactly. And I'll apologize on behalf of athletes everywhere here, on behalf of psychology, I would say self schema. I mean, what an awful name or word phrase to Describe something is actually quite simple. And what we're really talking about are simply the thoughts and feelings that make up the identity. So this is the architect. This is sort of the scaffold, as it were, the cognitive and emotional scaffolding that makes an identity. So these are the beliefs that you have about yourself in different aspects of your sport. It might be, you know, I'm a slow, like you said, I sucked as a runner, or I don't seem to be getting much faster, or everyone is faster than me. And so what we try and do is we work on the underlying mechanics of these thoughts and feelings. So one strategy, sort of an outside in, as Leslie talked about, is you fake it. You just put on a cloak of, a metaphorical cloak of, of another identity, and you kind of live through that, you act it. But the, the other method is to change the underlying belief system, the thoughts and feelings that you have. And this is where sort of traditional sort of psychology comes in, might be cognitive behavioral therapy or those sorts of attributes. But what you can do, everyone can really do it because you're really dissecting the logic of what you're saying about yourself. And you can do things like, for example, we know a big driver of, of the thoughts and feelings that you have about yourself is the environments that you're in. So if you're always training with people who are kicking your ass, no wonder you're getting a bit of a. Your identity is getting a bit undermined. So you need to periodize your training partners. You need to find opportunities where you're not only just getting beaten up or you have an opportunity to dish it out as well. And I think strategies like that are really, really helpful. What's critical about self schema and the way that you think about yourself is that it isn't just sort of this internal experience of misery or happiness, that it shapes your expectations of what you think you can do. And when you have thoughts and feelings that change what you think you can do, guess what it changes, what you attempt, or what you sign up for, what you persist at, or how you explain successes and failure. And those things can either make or break athletes. And there's plenty of examples where athletes have really had the classic, you know, you've got all the talent. I don't know why they can't put it together on race day. Many of those issues are connected to the thoughts and feelings that you have about yourself as an athlete. And so we're trying to underline, so we ask people to say, listen, describe yourself to Me as an athlete. When we have our initial athlete interviews and we don't give them any kind of leading information to say, okay, tell us about your PRs and your training. Just say, tell us about yourself as an athlete. And you listen to the words that they use. If there's a lot so of excusing and over explaining and rationalizing why they're not this or that or the other, or do you only coach fast people? Or I'm probably the kind of athlete who gets in the way of athletes like you, you know, when they might be a bit intimidated by Lesley's athletic identity and so on. So we listen to these words quite carefully because they have meaning. And then that gives us an opportunity to say, hey, listen, we noticed that you talk about yourself like this and you don't really see yourself as an athlete. They say, well, I'm not really. That's why I'm looking for a coach. I want to become an athlete. But you currently compete and you train. And so why is that you don't see yourself as an athlete and you find underlying that there's usually some sort of mismatch between how they think of themselves and what they actually are.

Or we get the opposite where they talk about themselves as though they are like a world champion and that they don't actually need any help. And you're thinking to yourself, well, why are you on the phone to me? Me? And you kind of dig and dig and you actually, you know, you kind of have to approach it in a different way as to how to almost break that athlete down a little bit to get to the root cause of where the issues lie.

Now you talk about this idea of an identity mismatch and areas where people's ability to form an identity kind of go wrong. You know, whether it be problems with a volatile identity or chasing a former identity or identity foreclosure. Can you go into some of the more common issues that you see in athletes who are having trouble actually putting together an athlete identity? And I should clarify before we jump into this, lest those of you listening in think this is just for pro athletes. I mean, let's say you want to, let's say you want a better CrossFit wad time. Or let's say you want to maybe qualify for half ironman or Ironman world championships as an age grouper, or maybe you want to go do.

Maybe you just want to cross the finish line of a frickin Spartan race, or you've got a goal that really hinges upon you having a better Athlete identity. This is really good information for you. This is not just stuff for pro athletes who are trying to make a paycheck doing this stuff.

Absolutely. And in fact, I'll say this is more the psychologist speaking now is that it's not even just about your athleticism. You can think of, we have identified the hats we wear in life as an employee, as a, as a partner, as a, you know, a parent. They're all identities and they each carry the same underlying self schema. And we know that these different identities are all related. Right. So if you get a little.

Nudge of one strengthening or maturing one identity, it can have a knock on effect on another. So there's some really good reasons for why we should be sort of self reflective about how we think of ourselves in these different roles. But one of the great examples I like for identity mismatching with athletes, and this is really, since we came to North America, would be that, you know, if you're a multi sport, if you're an endurance triathlete and you might be doing it for a year or so and you've done a sprint Olympic, you're not really considered a triathlete until you've done an Ironman. And so, and this is, this is not the same in Europe, right. The ITU and short course racing is much more popular. But, but here is the sense that if you sense, oh, I'm a triathlete, have you done an Ironman? And that's the first question. And no wonder that your identity can take a little bit of a blow. So you think, well, I'm not obviously a successful triathlete, I'm not going to be seen until I do an Ironman. And so we get all these people doing 70.3 and long distance, they may not actually enjoy it. And there's nothing wrong with sticking with Olympic or sprint distance triathlon. So there's a mismatch between how you think the world values that identify identity or sees it and how you see it as yourself. So I think that's one in particular.

Now, now what about this idea of identity foreclosure? What's that mean?

Yeah, so that basically identity foreclosure is when all the thoughts and beliefs that you're having are building a new identity. So our new identities are formed usually in critical life stages as we're becoming, you know, growing out of our teen years into an adult, we're developing our adult identity and when we have kids, a parent identity and so on. But if something happens to curtail that growth of natural thoughts and feelings about what it means to be this, this sort of person. And we see this, for example, for kids in, like in school, if you do sport and physical education, you think, oh, I'm not the sporty type, or you get picked last in pe or you're a bit nerdy and you weren't that athletic, or you're a bit uncoordinated. You kind of start seeing yourself, oh, that's not me, that's not who I am. And so before you've even had a chance to, to do any of it or even see and think of yourself as am I athletic or do I enjoy this? You kind of automatically like, okay, I put that to bed, that's not me. And you can go through life, in fact, and I give an example in the book of my sister as a great, as a good example. Like at 15, she decided that she just wasn't athletic. She didn't feel very competitive, she hated sport, she was much more arts driven. And so it wasn't until her mid-40s that she said, well, actually, you know, the growing muscles, muffin top and all the other things that maybe I should do some exercise. And she said, oh. And she discovered running and she loves running now. She said, how did I not know that this could be so great for me? She went through an identity foreclosure, so it's opening that back up for her. That's probably the most common that we see now.

The other idea, and I thought this was really interesting when it came to the athlete identity, was this problem with chasing a former identity identity, like knowing how good you were at a certain point in your life and then having to, having to kind of deal with the idea of.

You know, basically getting yourself back to that level or developing a new identity based on where you're at. Like, I think one big thing that seems relevant to me regarding this is this idea of people who kind of, you know, rocked the circuit back when they were a really fast 20 to 30 year old and now they're approaching like a master's category and kind of stuck in no man's land behind being kind of a slower age grouper or and you know, waiting to age up to the next category or being a slower professional athlete and waiting to become a masters. Like, what do you do about the people who are kind of like coming of age and having to deal with just slowing down as they age?

Yeah, you know, I really think that you have to get to the core of their passion. Why did they start the sport in the first place, what drove them into this, what excited them. And you know, that can sometimes be a complicated thing, especially if everything is about outcome goals in terms of performance related. But if we get to the essence of why did they like to get out there on the road and run that 10 mile time trial or whatever it might be, then you can kind of stay true to the motivations behind it. And then secondly, it's changing, you know, it's changing a bunch of those goals. So taking different things to focus on. So you know, whether that's getting more into some trail races instead of some road stuff or races in different places, or basically just having some different goals attached to your sport. Also training in different environments, so having different groups that you train with, different people, different routes that you train on, so that that comparison isn't always there. All the time, all the time, all the time.

And that comparison, in fact, how we think, you know, we've got this hindsight bias, the human brain does that we look at the past with through rose tinted glasses and so often we find that the life that we had then as we're remembering when we were lean and fit and strong and young and we never got injured and it wasn't actually as great as it seemed at the time. Right, sorry. As great as it seems now. And so we often try and get athletes to think about developing, not just rekindling an old identity, but building a new identity. We often talk about building version 2.0 of yourself. What would that look like? And all the habits that you really didn't have back then. And it might be that I was terrible, I neglected the XYZ or I didn't really care much about stretching or my nutrition was terrible, but you were a hammerhead, what have you. So we try and get athletes to think about building a version of themselves, of thoughts and beliefs about this identity, this self schema that is actually far more improved or a bit more rock solid than where they've come from. So once you get athletes to see, I'm not just trying to get back to where I was, I'm actually trying to become a better person inside about how I think about my sport. And that resonates with them, then it's not just so much of a deficit model that they're trying to, to kind of reconcile.

And I've had to do that personally myself. I mean, I struggled with Lyme's disease and a lot of injuries from 2012 onwards. And hey, I won three world titles back to back and then absolutely tanked to the point where I couldn't get out of bed. So coming back from that time and time again, I've had to keep, you know, redeveloping myself and changing things, you know, because I'll get on a start line and everyone doesn't, you know, everyone expects me to win. And it's like, well, you know, hey, I'm a different athlete now. My body's in a different place. You know, I've got to find reasons as to why this is still important for me. So previously when I was doing very well and winning all those races, I took so much for granted. You know, I didn't enjoy those wins. I didn't look around and enjoy the experience and talk to all the people there. And so version 2.0 for me is really embracing the gratitude of what I'm able to do and get out there, speak to people, really be an advocate of the sport. So, you know, I personally have had to do it myself.

Hey, I want to interrupt today's show to tell you about this hydrogen stuff. Molecular hydrogen infused water. Why is that so compelling these days? Because H2 infused water has what's called selective antioxidant behavior, meaning it can quell inflammation without blunting the hormetic response to exercise. You can drink this stuff after a workout and not mess up the ability of the workout to do things like generate new satellite cells and new muscle. It's a cell signaling molecule. It enhances mitochondrial function. There are over 1,100 peer reviewed studies that demonstrate the therapeutic and performance enhancing potential of molecular hydrogen infused water. I actually have water generator in my living room and I also travel with tablets that allow me to infuse my water with hydrogen. So the company that I use for both of these is called Trusy. Trusy actually makes hydrogen enriched water. Trusi is spelled T R U S I I T R U S I I. They even just released what's called the H2 Elite X which is a combination water and inhalation system. So you can literally just mainline hydrogen rich water into your system. You get 30% off the H2Now tablets. They're hydrogen rich tablets. Very simple. If you want to try this stuff out for yourself, you just go to truch2.com Ben that's a mouthful. True. C T R U S I I H2.com Ben and I'll also put that link into today's show notes. That'll get you 30% off if you enter the code Ben at checkout. And this podcast is also brought to you by the greatest shave on the face of the planet, Harry's. Harry's razors are in my opinion, the Cadillac of razors. They have a weighted ergonomic handle so you don't get carpal tunnel from shaving. A five blade razor with a lubricating strip and a trimmer blade. This really rich lathering shave gel, it's got aloe vera in it and a bunch of other nutrients that kind of of feed your face and even a handy dandy travel blade cover. Now that, that I just described to you is the full Harry's travel set. That's a $13 value. And you get to get that complete trial set for free. You can claim it@harrys.com greenfield that's H A R R Y-S.com greenfield now Harry's, because of the way that they design their blades on that five blade razor gives you an extremely smooth, very smooth, silky smooth, dare I say baby's butt smooth face when you shave with it. And if you don't love your shave, then you let Harry's know within 30 days they give you a full refund. So get that trial set redeemin absolutely yours course $13 value. You go to Harry's.com greenfield that's H-A-R-R-Y-S.com greenfield now what I really liked about the book and I actually cracked myself up when I got to this part was one of your fixes for giving yourself just like this super strong athlete identity using this concept of your alter ego.

And to me this was pretty cool because, you know, I grew up watching Rocky. I actually remember there was a period of time in my life when I was like 13, 14 years old to where I had this little gym in my, in my home and I let my parents or my parents let me just, you know, fill this gym with any dumbbells and barbells, anything else I wanted. And I would put on every single night Rocky III and just watch Rocky III over and over and over again. So like Rocky Balboa was who I associated with and still associate with, just working hard and sweating bullets in the gym. And I got to this part in the book where it was like, you know, your alter ego, who's your alter ego? And you write out the characteristics and the inspiration and what you wear and how you do. And I actually have, I'm looking at it right now on page 50 in your book. I was able to give my alter ego a name that fit my personality. With your alter ego development kit and my Entire alter ego was rocky. Like my characteristics, right? Like gritty, tough, hard working, underdog who smiles and loves life, then kicks ass and takes names and never quits. Trains smart, but also trains really hard and leaves nothing on the battlefield. And, you know, I go on and on and I've got this entire. Maybe I would take a photo of this and put it in the show notes for those of you listening. And you can go to Ben Green.

Braveathlete for the show notes. That's BenGreenfieldFitness.com braveathlete but walk me through this alter ego thing. Is this something you guys came up with?

Yes.

So, you know, interestingly enough, my background is actually in acting and theater, so my undergraduate and master's degree are in those fields. And so, you know, I was very adept at having to build characters. And what did that look like, you know, coming up with how they would move, how they would talk, points of inspiration. And so as I got back into the sport the second time for me in my 20s, you know, me as a personality, I'm sort of, I'm humble. I like to help people. No, no, no, you go first. I don't have that kind of aggression. And I realized that I needed it to be successful in the sport. I couldn't be a nervous Nelly on the start line. I needed to adopt these different tricks. So I started to, bit by bit, look at pictures, look for inspiration, look at other athletes, other characters that had this kind of unbridled confidence. And I got really into MMA fighting.

And, you know, absolutely loved Conor McGregor just because of his total confidence. You know, he just walks into a room, he doesn't give a shit what people think. And I was like, wow, imagine being like that. And I'm like, well, actually, maybe I should start to adopt some of his traits. So I created my own alter ego called Paddy McGinty.

And you didn't buy a million dollar sports car and a fully automatic machine gun for posing on Instagram, did you?

Somehow my Kia Sorento doesn't quite fit that model.

But yeah, I started to look at pictures of people like Connor, and, you know, I'd be rocking up to races just with this death stare and I'd like punch my fists. And had basically created this whole ritual that I would do. And then I started to do it in training, and interestingly enough, more and more people were like, wow, that Leslie Patterson, she's a bit of a bitch, isn't she? You know, if they met me when I was out there training, so I'd be so Focused and so intense, and I'd be. You know, I'd be my alter ego. And in fact, when we did a talk on the east coast, there's another top triathlete called Angela Nee who wins a bunch of races, and.

Angela.

Yeah, you know Angela. Yeah, she's awesome. So. And she's a badass.

And she came up to me. She was actually the first person who I ever interviewed for the Ben Greenfield fitness podcast ever.

You're kidding.

No, that was like, nine. Nine years ago. Yeah.

Oh, my gosh. Yeah, she's. I mean. Oh, on the bike. She's just outrageously good. And so she came up to me after we did a talk about the book, and she came up and she said, leslie, you know, she's like, I just always thought you were a bitch. So, you know. So, unfortunately, sometimes building that alter ego, yes, it can be very helpful for certain instances, like being in a race situation or whatnot, but you have to learn to be able to come in and out of it. So I definitely have strategies to come in and out of that character. Because when you spend, you know, five, six hours a day training and you're, you know, I'm in Paddy mode mode, that's the last thing Simon wants to see.

When.

When I get home, Paddy's not so fun to go to bed.

I love you, dear, but I want you not to be a male Irish psychopath.

You don't want to snuggle with Patty McGinty at the end of the night, but it is kind of cool how you can. You can basically have this alter ego that you just tap into when it's time to go to battle. And I think that not enough people kind of have that concept. This was something that. That I actually wanted to ask you this later on the interview. I'm just gonna ask you right now, though, this whole idea of rituals, right? Like, I go to races now and. And competitions and the gym and wherever else, where back in the day, like, people would be getting kind of hyped up, they'd be tapping into that alter ego, and they would even have rituals, you know, and. And specific sets of. Of almost like these. These sacred, superstitious type of things that they do before a race, right? Like the music you listen to and the stretches that you do and where you slip off to do your special breathwork patterns, like, everything. And now in an era of you take out your smartphone and you're doing selfies and Snapchats before a race, it seems like a lot fewer people are focusing on this Whole idea of a ritual before a competition, especially before like an athletic event. So why are rituals so important? And what do you, what do you think like about the kind of when you take the temperature of what goes on now at let's say, you know, an Ironman triathlon or some other race compared to the way that it maybe used to be?

Yeah, I think the funny, the interesting thing about rituals is that they work for many different reasons. In fact, there's lots of now good evidence we've got pre performance rituals, how they improve lower pre competition anxiety, help in race decision making and so on. But so one of the most obvious things is that it stops you making stupid decisions the night before or the morning of forgetting stuff. So if everything is so routinized, for want of a word, you're doing exactly the same thing in exactly the same order that's been planned, then there's less chance of you driving off without your helmet or rocking up to a race and forgetting your shoes. So there is a big element of sort of the structure to it, to preparation. The other side is that it provides some sort of mental comfort blanket as well, is that we know that what we call cognitive anxiety, sort of a fear and apprehension, it peaks, you know, in the few hours before an event. And so if we can have an opportunity to distract or play some interfere, run some interference on that internal chatter so that we can control it and direct it to things that controlling our physical response. So it might be a breath exercise or just kind of visualizing the course or visualizing the walkthrough of a transition in triathlon, so you know where you're running in, running out and biking in and so on. So there's a whole host of reasons why that helps. What's amazing for the athletes that we've coached is that it's not so much that they are taking selfies and Snapchatting before races, is that when you ask them, so tell me what goes on, you know, the night before and right up to the morning off, they just, there's no real systematicness to it at all. Well, I just kind of roll up and I do this and then if I see so and so, and then before you know it, you're at the mercy of your eyes and your ears. And we know that the incoming information, your amygdala, this part deep in your limbic system is processing threat cues. You're just asking for trouble, really. You're asking for these thoughts to you've only got to see someone or this opposition. I didn't think they were going to be there. They're fit, they're looking lean and fit and strong, or you're noticing the weather and, oh, my God, I hope it doesn't rain. And before you know it, any of these sort of intrusive thoughts that are taking you off task are basically saying, come on, come with me, let's go down the rabbit hole. And before you know it, you've witnessed yourself up into some sort of frenzy of why this isn't going to work well for you. So the alter ego is one strategy for really making that cast iron. So you've actually got a playbook. But if you don't have one for that, then just sort of writing down how, hour by hour, minute by minute, how am I spending my time? When am I getting up before a race? What am I going to eat? When am I going to eat? When do I need to load the car, when do I need to leave, when do I do my walkthrough? When do I start this warm up, when do I start that warm up? And you're. And you're following it like you would do a lesson plan. And when you give athletes this, it helps them. It becomes like it's very comforting to them. I've got this sort of system in place. No matter how stressful, I'm always going to do the same thing over and over again, whether it's the world championships or the local turkey trot. It doesn't really, doesn't really matter. So it's really, really important.

But, you know, I really do think that the reason a lot of people don't do this is because they don't want to commit. If they're being seen to be too serious about their sport, then what does that say when they're, you know, at the back of the pack or just completing a 5K or something that is externally seen to be, oh, well, why are you taking this so seriously? You're not a professional. And again, that then comes down to your sense of identity or your sense of sense of worth. For example, we get into a lot of these sorts of issues. So I really do think that that's why people do less and less of this.

Yeah. One of the things I like, though, is you've got like these contingency plans. You know, for example, if. If you check your phone in the morning and there's something urgent that you need to respond to before you run, then you'll do this, or, you know, create a habit of putting the phone on airplane mode when you go to bed at night and not actually checking the phone in the morning until you up, don't wake with your run, you know, or, or for me, like if you get to get to the race and the, and the porta potty line is super long and you need to use the restroom before the race, you feel like you're not gonna have time. Then rather than doing all your pre race stretching and warm up over by the start line, you're gonna do all your pre race stretching and warm up right there while you're standing in line at the porta potty. And you know, you have all these little things that you write down. So once you show up at the race, you can actually complete your ritual. Or whether, you know, the same can apply to training, of course, as well. You know, you have these rituals set up. And I mean, I have, you know, even for my home workouts, the same set little stretch routine that I go through each time. And the little rules, my little superstitious things like before whatever workout it is, right, I do 30 burpees. That's just the way I start the workout is I do 30 burpees. And that tells my body, it sends the message, hey, the workout is starting and do you 30 burpees. Whether it's kind of me, whether I'm going for a run or paddle board or whatever. 30 burpees. So, yeah, I love the idea that you guys have these rituals kind of woven into the book is something that's, that's important.

Yeah. And I think the thing is about rituals as well is that it gives us the opportunity for what we call feed forward. We're familiar with feedback, right, that you get information about something that you've just done. But feed forward is when you start thinking you do some makeup, time travel and play out events happening that haven't yet happened. And it gives you opportunities, just like you said, to see where things might go wrong. And so step one is creating the ritual and practicing it. And step two, we then have our athletes throw curveballs at them and say, okay, there's no the port. Like you said, the line for the portaloo is too long to wait for you to start. What do you do? And so they have to have a little subroutine of the ritual. They know exactly what to do. And there's, there's nothing that's too small for this. I worked with an ultra runner who was going to do western states or a very long run, and I asked them to come up with their little ritual. And then all the things that could go wrong. And you know, and they sent me back a list of 127 things that could go wrong. And he said, I didn't realize that. And it actually got me a bit nerve wracked that all these things, whether it's, you know, suddenly there's lightning or might get a blister and I have this and on and on and on. But then what we did is systematically you're then saying, okay, if this does happen, and a series of if then statements for these 127 things, you came up with a plan for every single one of them. And it doesn't matter that the likelihood of these things happening might be quite small. It's the fact that no matter what happens, I've got this. And that is such a huge part of having the mindset to give an optimal performance is knowing that you are, you can look around the start line. And Lesley often talks about this and she can look around, say, yes, I've out trained you, but I can out suffer you and I will out think you on this no matter what happens. I've got better skills to cope with it. So the more adversity that you face that's going to affect other people, the better it is for you because you've already got contingency plans ahead and it might be something. This doesn't have to be a professional athlete. If you talk about the first time triathlon and they're worried about not making it through the swim, what if I get a panic attack? And what if I start to get so nervous during the swim I have to hang onto a kayak? And you start giving people little contingencies about emergency strokes and forward propulsion and looking up and finding an object in the sky that you focus on. So knowing that you've got that often is enough to alleviate the onset of those symptoms. Expectation and manipulating expectation is such a critical weapon for athletes.

Athletes, you, you have an entire chapter about dealing with injuries. What you know, obviously a lot of people get injured. It derails you for me can be depressing because you've put all your time into getting ready for this race. You know, this happened to me a few weeks ago, right? I got hit by a car. I wasn't able to go do the race and yeah, mess with me mentally and emotionally. When you put that much time and effort and thought into going and, you know, throwing down the start line, you can't even show up at the start line. What, what kind of advice do you have? Like what's the best of the best Advice for coping with an injury. When you've got all your identity wrapped into being an athlete and you've got all this time and money put into some competition or event that you're going to do, what, what's your advice for when you get injured?

Injured? I think the first thing is to think your way through the injury as you would do as an athlete. So what's amazing that we find with athletes is they become injured and they suddenly turn into this passive, sort of lackadaisical, unmotivated. But there's no hustle to them getting treatment. There's no hustle to getting second opinions, which they would do if they weren't injured about some other aspect of their sport. So it's kind of find the kind of patient that you are and learning ahead of time about where they, what we call them gremlins, little things that kind of maladaptive ways of thinking are going to derail or at least reduce your likelihood of getting back to competing as quickly as possible. And Lesley can talk about this ad nauseam because she's had so many injuries, she's come out the other side of so many.

I've had chronic injuries that have lasted years and years. I've had acute injuries. I've, you know, being on the prep, you know, sort of on the cusp of major world championships and had fractures, you know, six weeks out and all sorts. And I think the important thing to remember, and you've kind of touched on this, Ben, is your identity at that point is very, very wrapped up in being an athlete. And let's be honest, you know, we're all pretty A type personalities, obsessive, compulsive. We're kind of addicted to the sport. The adrenaline we get from it, the body image issues that we have with it. So when that rug is pulled out from under your feet, you're, I mean, catatonic in some instances, you know, life is falling apart. So I personally have to take all of that energy, all of that emotional charge, if you will, and put it into fixing myself and learning about myself for the future so I can build again I that 2.0 athlete. That's better. So first protocol for me is always to figure out why did I get injured. So many people out there, all they do is they treat the symptoms. You know, they go for a massage, they get art, they, you know, take an extra supplement and all that is doing is putting a band aid on it. You need to figure out why did it happen? Now, of course, if you were hit by a truck or something like that, you know, that's slightly different. But a lot of people are going to be dealing with over it, you know, overuse injuries. So you need to have a team of people around you that you need to have confidence in that you've been referred to by other people. You know, maybe it's a physical therapist, maybe it's a biomechanist looking at how you move through space. So getting to the real bottom of why did this happen? So that you can start fixing it now so that yes, when you do treat the symptoms and you get back to the sport, you're not going to re injure yourself. Also what it does is it makes you, it empowers you. You're learning more about your body and how you work. And sometimes you can come out of an injury actually stronger, fitter, faster, more economical and bulletproof for the future. So it feels like you're really doing something positive rather than wallowing in that negativity of the energy. And then of course, treating the symptoms, really looking at all of the modalities out there that you have access to that you can speak to friends about. Maybe it's, you know, cold laser, maybe it's injection therapy, maybe it's art massage. There's so many different things that you can try. And again, by trying these things, it's kind of like a positive, right? You, you feel like you're doing something to make a difference. And then the other side of it is, okay, how can I still feel like I'm moving forward in the sport even although I've got this injury, what sports can I do to maintain some kind of aerobic fitness or strength that are not going to hamper my comeback from this injury? So for instance, for me, when I have a running injury, one thing I can often do is get on the StairMaster, that revolving staircase at the gym. And that thing kicks my ever loving ass. And I can get on there, I can support a bit of my weight, I can build some strength. It's almost like hill repeats, running. And physically it almost feels the same as running. So I'm kind of getting a bit of those endorphins. Or maybe for example, it's getting in the pool and doing some more swimming, working on your technique, getting video analysis, always feeling like you're progressing in some way so that all that negativity of the injury doesn't weigh you down. And then of course, you have the body image issues. A big thing for me, and I've dealt with kind of eating disorders myself in the past Is, you know, you've been the fittest and the leanest you've ever been. You're on the cusp of doing this big race and you get injured and you can't do the sport and all of those gremlins start coming in. So it's facing some of those things head on, dealing with the kind of tragedy of it all and working through it. And Kennesai can definitely talk about some examples of me and losing my.

Yeah, yeah, listen, I've got personal and professional experience working with Lesley. Sometimes I think I need to be a psychologist to be married to her, you know, the ups and downs of her injury experience. But I think what's really important is to recognize that some athletes, when they get injured, they have, and we've now got some scientific evidence for this, they often go through a response that's not too dissimilar to bereavement. Right. And the five stage grief response, for example, is a good example of this, is to say that some athletes are in denial. They just. Just kind of keep running through it or refuse to accept it. They go through sort of some angry phase or they go through some bargaining where you almost with yourself, I won't do this again. Just let me get through this and I promise to change my ways and so on. And what we know is that it's okay to be in these stages if you start lingering in them, if you are frustrated with yourself or angry, or if you're feeling depressed about it, then that's a normal part for many people of coping with injury. But most people don't actually follow in our estimation, and by this is some of the literature as well, about 10 to 15% of athletes go through this sort of grief response. So knowing whether you're a kind of a grief type responder to injury, the other, the majority is through what we call this cognitive appraisal. So in other words, that how we think about injury and what it means to us and our identity determines in part how we cope with it. And so you can change how you appraise injury. We have this little worksheet to help you do that. And for example, one of the steps that you do is like not knowing what's wrong with you. It's an unforgivable thing that an athlete has if you don't actually know what's wrong. Sure, there are some things that are so difficult to diagnose and we don't know and specialists don't know and so on, but out of laziness or being unmotivated to find out what's wrong with you is really unforgivable as an athlete. You can, you know, I'm not advocating necessarily Dr. Google all the time, but you can find out as much as possible about that injury and why you got it before you start confronting the other stuff. And then we know that we tend to catastrophize and awful eyes and all the other isings that psychologists like to think about. Everything's ruined now, what's the point anymore? And.

You end up eating unhealthily or you stop doing all the other things that contribute to you performing, even if they're not related to your injury. So you have to confront some of kind of this bullshit that your head is telling you as well about it. So having a systematic plan for when you get injured is really important. And it's not just about how you get through the injury. For example, how you cope with your injury, how you appraise that injury actually predicts the risk of you getting injured again in the future. So there's some, there's some knock on effect of your experience in coping with it now that looks at your affectual susceptibility to getting re injured later on. So you're doing yourself some preventive work as well by getting through and coming unstuck from the crap that you're in now.

That's what I liked about training for triathlon was if you got a running injury you just go swimming, or if you get a cycling injury, you just go swimming or you get a running injury, you go cycling. And yeah, I mean like I never get it when you know, I still coach folks, folks and I don't want to throw them under the bus, but they'll sprain their ankle and they won't tell me and then they'll get in touch with me a week later and be like, yeah, I didn't do any workouts this week because I sprained my ankle.

Could have done so many full body strength training workouts and swimming and upper body training and yeah, I mean that's what keeps you sane when you're injured a lot of the time. In addition to being able to go back and spend that time to be able to identify how you could never get that injury to happen again by equipping your body to become a little bit more bulletproof to whatever happened to you. And then you figure out other ways to improve fitness. I mean, even if you freaking can't even exercise at all. There's so much research behind, for example, heat therapy and cold therapy is A great way to improve your cardiovascular blood flow, nitric oxide production, and all of these fitness elements that you, you that can be had without even putting any stress on the joints. So, yeah, I thought the chapter on injury was really good. And there really is no excuse for not being able to get through an injury both mentally and physically and come out stronger on the other side.

Oh, big time. I mean, I was just going to say one example. I ended up breaking my wrist and my hand about a week before I was supposed to go to Europe and racing World cup mountain bike racing. And it was a huge, huge, big traversy. I was super duper fit. So I absolutely lost my wad. Cried, cried, cried, cried, cried for about maybe three, four hours as I was at the hospital. And I came out with everything bandaged up and I said to my buddy, get me on a stationary trainer. I want to know that I can do something. I ended up that same day doing two hours on the stationary trainer. And I thought, okay, I can salvage this. So we ended up going to Atlanta. And just like your point, I figured I might as well go and have some other stress on the body that is going up to altitude where I'm going to produce more red blood cells and have a greater stress in the body. And I did a month of altitude training on the stationary trainer and ended up coming out definitely fitter than I was going, you know, going in. So it's all a question of kind of motivation and attitude.

Yeah, I've learned so much and gotten so much more fit through injuries. It's crazy. I should just injure myself more often. I think good strategy. I don't really have an issue pushing myself outside my comfort zone. I love to do it. I thrive on that. But then I run into people who I'll say, hey, come do a Spartan race with me. And they're like, well, I've never done one. I'm not going to do that. It's, I'm not a, I'm not a Spartan athlete and I don't know how to climb a rope or, you know, I'll invite someone to go paddleboarding with me and they're, you know, they'll say, well, I don't, I don't like cold water, I'm afraid I might fall in, etc. What are your, what are your best tips for getting somebody outside of their comfort zone?

Yeah, that's a great question. It's really one of the most common ones we get as well from our athletes about either stepping up to a new category or Even a new sport or a new distance. And one of the things that really you have to confront is why people having these thoughts and feelings right, that they don't want. And we start off in our book with teaching athletes a mental model based on some, some of the latest neuroscientific research, which is notoriously absent in sports psychology, I would say. So we know much more now about the brain and why we're fed these thoughts and feelings. But one of the concepts that we think is that you're, you know, a part of your brain, the limbic system is really terrified, okay? It wants to keep you alive. It's our, you know, emotion central fight or flight response, where all these other structures, amygdala and hippocampus and all these other Latin structures are. But one of the things that it's really terrified of in air quotes here, assuming that it has an identity, is that it's worried about feeling humiliated, embarrassed, or shown to be inadequate. And those three things, your brain will literally shit the bed if it thinks that there's an opportunity for those, those things to happen. And so most comfort zones stem from either genuine fear of physical harm or more likely, there's going to be some embarrassment, humiliation, or shown to be inadequate. So am I doing the right thing? You don't want to suck in front of other people. If other people are watching you suck, that's even worse. What's even worse than that is sucking. Other people seeing you suck and everybody else around you clearly not sucking. So the kind of trifecta of sucking is really creates this climate, the people shying away from situations that scare you. So what we try and have athletes do is to really think about this in the context of how you try and detach yourself from that experience of those thoughts that you having are kind of not real. They're made up. They're designed to kind of not put you. We have emotions, for example, to drive decision making. And the decision making is stay away, do something you're good at. Don't put yourself in this environment because it doesn't want you to feel those particular, to be vulnerable. And millions of years ago, being in those states, humiliated, vulnerable or inadequate did actually probably mean death. Because you're foraging for food on your own, you have to defend yourself. But now in the relatively, you know, low stress suburbs, those things aren't true. So it's confronting some of this logic. So we try and get people to think about.

Sort of the facts and logic behind, okay, well, if you're worried about looking stupid let's talk about that. What does that look like? But you think people are going to be ridiculing you or laughing at you, or you're saying, listen, I feel I'm so fat in my Lycra, no one, I don't want to be seen. Well, I see myself as a sort of a chunky monkey out there. And everyone else, they're all lean and fit and super strong athletes. So. So what we try and do is we disarm sort of the logic or the irrational logic, I should say, of some of the ways that we construct these thoughts. And then we try and get people to think that you're not actually your thoughts and feelings, you're the container for them. This is getting a little bit meta here. And we have a chapter in our book that really talks about this notion of detaching from the experience and how critical it is. The whole host of psychological experiences and happiness in general, the ability, this is what meditation imparts is teaching us to do, to have to be able to stand back from the way that we experience the world and not to see that as being necessarily the truth. So it's quite important firstly that you recognize that people don't fail. Actions can fail or behaviors can fail. And even we try and change the words failure because we talk about guidance a lot and feedback and really you don't think there are other things that we do in life that we don't anywhere near think about failure in the same way. Like teaching yourself to juggle in the comfort of your own home, even though you know that you can't do it, is far less intimidating, for example, than doing your first 5k. Why is that? It's a skill. Other people can do it. Other people are so self absorbed, they don't really care about what you're doing if you're not trying. So we, we try and recognize that most of the time you're not being judged or evaluated the way that you think you are. And then we try and have people reframe goals and reframing the way that you think about what constitutes failure is really critical. In fact, probably one of the most single important principles for mental conditioning for all people who are in performance situations is to change, fundamentally change our relationship with failure, what it's actually telling us and how we get around there. And this has been written about extensively and researched extensively. So we've got some really good strategies now. And one of them those is staying in the present, right? Having becoming obsessed with presentism here and now, thinking at the Expense of thinking about what's just gone on. Oh my God, I can't believe I did that. Why did I do that? I can't get that out of my head. I screwed up, I fluffed that. Or thinking about the future. Oh my God, now it's already sucking. I'm going to be so far behind. People are going to be waiting for me. They're going to be, why are they not as good? And so on and so on. And all these things determine from what contributes to best possible performances given the cards you have on the day. And it's all about staying in the here and now, being present. So we have a little mantra that we teach athletes how to do this and we call it the effort and attitude. So the two things that are always in your control are your effort, how hard you push, how tactically or technically you prepare for the next minute that you've got, give the skills that you have and always focusing on that and then your attitude, staying positive. And there's a whole host of again, good research to show why positive thinking and staying positive in the face of adversity is really critical. It changes perception of pain, it changes your perception of time and all these other things that are really important. So effort and attitude and staying in the moment are really critical. And this is a great segue into what we consider to be one of the most important stem cell skills for athletes. And this is the ability to stay in the moment, which is meditation or mindfulness training. If there's one skill that we could all benefit from, not just in sport, but being able to control with intrusive thoughts and feelings in that time and not let them get their hooks into us so that we stay in the present. It's meditation or mindfulness training. We don't often use the word, the M word with Atlanta because their eyes roll back in their heads and they'll think, oh, am I going to have to listen to Enya and join a drumming circle? Or that's not me, I'm not spiritual. But it's not about that at all. And now there's such good research to show what mindfulness training is doing, not just at the feel good attention level, like staying present, but it like for example, it has a direct impact on the physical structure of the amygdala. It shrinks the amygdala that sort of of the sensory radar of processing threat cues. It's having a direct impact. So there are lots of reasons why this is important. But if you don't develop that underlying skill and you just hope in the moment that you can sort of just stay present on effort and attitude. It's hard, but we try and outline the steps to do that. And athletes having quite incredible breakthroughs in their performance when they're able to do that. And so we've got some little easy techniques, whether it's, you know, you learn to count your leg turnover or arm turnover to six or eight in time, you segment the event that you're doing. So you only think about the little chunk in front of you. We've got a whole host of other things, little techniques that you can latch onto that are changing your perception of effort, they're changing your perception of time. You're staying in the moment, you're not thinking about what's just gone on and what's going on in the future. That's really critical for doing that. And once you approach, you're able to do the this, all of these situations inside and out of, outside of our comfort zone just become another experience that you then aren't worried about so much what people are thinking about you or looking embarrassed or humiliated. Because all I know is that when I do my little post event autopsy and we say, did you give it everything and did you stay positive? If you say yes and yes to that, we can't ask any more of you. You might be in the slowest shit on the day for whatever reason, but on the day, if you can say to us that you gave it everything and you kept that too positive, we cannot ask any more of you and you can't ask any more of yourself when you do that. So that's why it becomes sort of the little Willy Wonka's golden ticket of having a great race.

What about this idea of thumb tapping? Is that related to the idea of getting outside your comfort zone? Because you have this exercise called thumb tapping.

I know thumb tapping. And not to be confused with sort of the rather pseudo scientific finger tapping of meridian lines and so on. Thumb tapping, actually they, they use a version of this. Actually it can. Midwives used to use it to help with birthing pain, where the midwife would just either squeeze or tap on the forearm of the mom in labor to focus attention as a little distraction technique. And the brain seems to love.

Rhythmicity. So anything that has a metronome quality to it or rhythm, so a sense of forward progress, a sense of sequence, and there are a whole host of reasons why that is. Different parts of our brain get activated which sort of down regulate, you know, prefrontal cortex over analysis. And so on. So any opportunity we can get to narrow in on a little cue. So there's nothing really sort of sort of hoodoo voodoo about thumb tapping. All it means is simply when you're preferably it's best when you're running so your hands are free. You're not trying to hold on to something as part of the activity you're in. If you imagine you've got a pen, a clicker pen in each hand with a clenched fist, and with each thumb, you're clicking down on the little nib to open, close the pen. So as you're running, you're clipping your thumbs down on your curled index finger in time with the action that you're doing. And what this seems to do is one indicator. It focuses our attention. It becomes just like when you meditate, it's a cue, like you focus on your breathing. It's an internal thing, it distracting and so on. It does that. You can also set your cadence to it to speed up or slow down. So it becomes this little distraction that helps athletes cope with short periods of intolerance. Things that are really starting to struggle. So it might be there's a minute, this is hill that I'm really struggling with, or it's the last mile, or it's just a short period of time that I really need to suck it up, staying on that wheel or staying with that faster athlete. And what athletes tell us when we've trained them to use it is that it changes their perception of effort, their perception of pain reduces, their perception of time changes. And again, there's nothing sort of weird about it. It's just the fact that you're using a little fit physical cue to focus on. And it really helps. So most athletes tap both thumbs in time with their leg turner when they're running, rather than like left thumb, left leg, right thumb, right leg and so on. So try it. It's really quite great. I use it a lot when I'm racing. Leslie uses it as well, and many of our athletes do, to cope with little periods of sort of intense discomfort.

Yeah, he uses it when he's trying to keep up with me.

It sounds really similar, this concept of an anchor. I interviewed this guy named Andy Murphy on the show a couple years ago and he's. He's an nlp. Like a neuro linguistic programming expert. I think it's. That's what NLP stands for, if I remember properly. And.

The idea was anytime you really want to go deep into the pain cave, you develop this anchor. And mine was the only thing was that it kind of sucked for swimming, but you. You press your index, index finger against your thumb really hard, and that was the anchor that we developed during that NLP programming session that he did with me. And. And your thumb tapping technique in this book really reminded me of that. You're just, like, tapping almost like these. These. These tiny little. I think you call them. Yeah, the. The. It's like a metronomic cue. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I really dig that strategy. I mean, there's all sorts of really cool strategies in the book, but. But that one was. Was. Seemed especially useful.

Yeah, it is. And all this technique isn't, you know, isn't based on NLP foundations or. Or any other aspects about, you know, different activating different hemispheres of the brain. It's simply a focus, a physical focus that has a metronomic quality to it that controls our ears and our eyes and focus and channels effort, and it really seems to be effective. So we love it.

Well, for those of you listening in, this book is called the Brave Athlete, and I'm gonna put the show notes for everything we talked about. A link to the book, to Simon and Leslie's website, and also to some of those other podcasts I mentioned, like my one with Andy Murphy about developing this anchor to switch off pain during exercise, and the one that I did with Angela Nath way back in the day. I'll link to all that stuff. Just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com BraveAthlete when you go there, be sure to grab the book too, because it really is. It's a fantastic read. If you've ever had to deal with psychological issues around exercising, pushing yourself, being an athlete, forming an athlete identity, everything's in there. So, Simon and Leslie, thanks for writing this book and for coming on the show today.

Great. Yeah, no, we're super stoked. And just for those folks out there that like to listen to things as they train, it's actually an audiobook as well. And we. We narrate it, in fact, so if you want to laugh on that. Yeah. You can listen to your audiobook as well. You can get that on Amazon too.

Wait, you said you do what? If you want to laugh at it.

Oh, I listen to it on audiobook if you want to.

Oh, oh, you. You narrate it. Yeah, you narrate it. Cool. Yeah, that's a pain. I narrated My book took freaking forever.

Oh.

Plus, we've got the Scottish and English accents going every other chapter, so that might be a bit confusing.

Be a good listen. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on again. The show notes are at BenGreenfieldFitness.com BraveAthlete and until next time, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Simon Marshall and Leslie Patterson signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have an amazing week.

You've been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness this podcast.

Go to BenGreenfield Fitness.com for even more.

Cutting edge fitness and performance advice.

It.