Internal Drive, Overcoming Resistance, How to Create Challenges Throughout The Year, and Much More With Ash Ghandehari!

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness show, when you're getting to a level of performance for many athletes, that fine tuning those little things makes massive changes. It's even more important when you're not at that level of athlete. Imagine those little changes can make a massive difference in your health, your wellness, how you're handling your day and day to day life. If you look at the research, less than 10% actually make a New Year's resolution a reality. And it takes them about 10 years, and then the other 90% forget about it after a month. How do you beat that resistance, that internal resistance that comes up? We all have that internal resistance, no matter what you challenge yourself with.

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 Greenfield Fitness Podcast.

Hey there, Ash here, and I want to welcome you back to Get Fit Summit. I have a special guest for us to share with you today. And I have to tell you, I'm here in Vail Color and I'm looking out at the Lyft right now, and I wanted to share with a special guest with you from my vacation because I think he's going to just really add tremendous value in terms of what we've been talking about around nutrition, fitness, and really having the complete life. And I can tell you that he is truly living that complete life with his family, his kids. He's got, you know, he's done multiple Ironmans like I have as well, and he truly lives what he preaches. And without further ado, I want to introduce Ben Greenfield. He has a podcast and you can check him out afterwards and he'll direct us on where we could go to. But without further ado, I want to welcome Ben. Ben, welcome aboard.

Thanks, man. Although if I was in Vail, I'd probably be super duper tempted to be out ripping up the slopes right now. You have a great deal of self control to be sitting indoors, podcasting, surrounded by that.

I have to tell you, it's dumped completely before we got here. And I've been here now. It's my third day. And I was like, hey, you know what? Take A break, give back a little bit and then hit the later this afternoon. So I can guarantee you right after this I'm going to be right back out there. And I've got my beanie hair on too, so it's all good.

All right, cool.

Listen, I want to thank you for jumping on and sharing some wisdom around. I think we could talk into nutrition, we could talk into fitness and, and that complete life because I think I know that you are living it just based on our conversation today and my experience of you through others. So where do you want to start off? I think we've talked a lot around nutrition on this summit. I would like to really tap into the fitness life and how you talk about this human performance. Can you just tap into that a little bit with us?

No, I want to talk about kale smoothies, man. Yeah, you know what, that, that, honestly, that's a frickin broad question. What do you want to know?

Well, you know, I think there's some people in the audience like you and I maybe, you know, I know you've done a number of Ironmans. I've done seven and had the opportunity.

Kona and I remember I've done 12. Slacker. Oh man.

Listen, you got the bike to another.

Level, but I quit doing them. I decided to move on to a new chapter in life and now I'm doing more obstacle course racing and hunting and adventure racing and things along those lines. But I still highly respect triathlon. And one of the things that I tell myself just because triathlon is a great cross training sport, I always want to be in good enough shape until basically I die to be able to jump into a sprint triathlon. If I can swim and I can bike and I can run at least that minimal distance, I know I've kept myself in decent cardiovascular shape.

Yeah, totally, I get that. Totally agree with you on that. So here's the deal. So I guess I want to tap into that because really successful people in fitness and just in life in general I think are quite adaptive to change and making it, you know, going for that. What's next? I mean, they're always asking what's next? You know, we have that mutual friend Joe Desant of ours who likes to carry around a 40 kilo kettle ball these days. So what is if there's that person right now sitting on a couch, they could literally ask what's next for themselves and get up and do something. And if there's someone that's done multiple Ironmans and is maybe worn out from it, like I Am I literally haven't done anything since Kona last year. What is it that drives you to go to that next level? What is it that drives you to continue to evolve and shift and change in your fitness and what's required to make that mental shift happen?

Well, you know, there's this concept that author Nassim Talib outlines in his book Antifragile. You know, the body adapts, the body becomes very efficient and economical and you know, frankly, to use the highly scientific term used to certain activities. And those would be the activities that we repeat over and over again when we get stuck in our comfort zone. Those are the activities that no longer produce things like neuroplasticity and neurogenesis and brain derived neurotrophic factor and all these things that challenge us from a cognitive standpoint or that challenge our nervous system from a skill based standpoint, or the challenge our lungs or our breath or our muscle fibers from a different angle or a different load. And it is very easy to get stuck in that rut. You know, I actually I talk about in this book about, you know, the triathlete who all they do is swim and bike and run, you know, each day or each week, you know, with chronic repetitive motion in those exact planes. And by never getting out of that, they look great in spandex, you know, bent over a bicycle, but they don't necessarily have the full fitness of the human body or the human brain that they're capable of. And in many cases you, you see a lot of people who are like healthy on the outside, but not healthy on the inside, healthy on the outside, but you more or less dying on the inside. When you look at things like hscrp, an inflammatory marker, or you look at thyroid hormone levels, or you look at testosterone, or you look at other qualitative variables like sleep quality, laying awake at night or waking up too early in the morning, or libido or gut issues, bloating, et cetera. There's all these things that creep up when you don't address the whole picture of your health or when you get stuck in a rut of doing the same activity over and over again. So when you say what's next? I would say there's two things that are next. Whether you're in couch potato mode or whether you're a fricking ironman triathlete. Number one, how can you challenge yourself above and beyond what your body has gotten used to, Right? So for me that meant learning instead of just how to swim and bike and run, which I got Pretty darn efficient at how to do things like kickbox, swing a kettlebell, you know, crawl under barbed wire, climb a rope. I couldn't even fricking climb a rope until two years ago. You know, I could do Kona Ironman but couldn't climb a 20 foot rope, you know. And so by training my body how to do all of these things, I had to challenge not just my body, but also my brain. I think that's one important thing is to ask yourself, have I done something this week that makes me uncomfortable? Not just physically, Right? Because you can make yourself uncomfortable physically if you're already a really good swimmer by just swimming harder. But if you're already a really good swimmer, could you perhaps try to play the ukulele to challenge your brain? Or could you try to, you know, teach yourself how to carry an atlas stone across the gym to challenge your body? Certainly. And then the other thing you gotta ask yourself is like, how, how much am I addressing, like internal health, not just external health, right? Like how much am I thinking beyond like six pack abs or low body fat and instead looking into my hormones, looking into, you know, what I consider to be like the gold standard range of testing for everybody on the face of the planet. And that would be doing a blood test, right? To look at blood biomarkers, doing a saliva test to look at your DNA, doing a urine test to look at your hormones because they fluctuate all day long. Can't just do a blood test for those. And then looking at your poop to see what's going on from like a bacteria and yeast and fungus standpoint. And I would say if you, if you start with those two things, right, like challenging your body and brain by making sure that you're not stuck in your comfort zone no matter how hard or how much you think you're exercising. And then number two, testing and quantifying your body to see if there's any little gaps that you need to fix. Those are kind of like the two big, big steps to getting a better body and better brain and better health.

Awesome. So love what you're sharing. You know, challenging yourself and then the testing. And I think I would say testing is essential to get to know where you're starting at. So if you're doing the testing, I mean the reality of it is going to your general physician to do evaluation and look at the testing, look at the results and evaluate those with you. Most likely they're not going to look at it at the detailed level that you're speaking of. I Know that from personal experience. So where would you say to start with that? Where do you go to evaluate tests? I mean, the average person is not going to know how to evaluate that test and say, okay, well this is what I'm low on. This is what I need support on.

Yeah, sure, there's a few options that you have. First of all, you could switch docs, which I realize that right now with Obamacare, like for me, I'm signed up with group health. I have limited access to a certain number of physicians when it comes to having insurance pay for the costs of my medical care. There is a directory, there's a few good directories. Like Primal Docs is a good one. The one that's really good, in my opinion is the Functional Medicine website. I believe it's functionalmedicine.org, don't quote me on that. But there's a network or community or directory, I guess would be the correct term of functional medicine practitioners. And functional medicine practitioners really do look at the whole big picture of health rather than looking at, say what modern medicine would look at, which would basically be what are the very, very basic tests and which of these things can I throw drugs at? So Functional Medicine Practitioner directory is really good. I think it's again functionalmedicine.org, but you could find it just by doing a Google search for functional functional doctor directory and it would be one of the first results. The other thing that you can do is there's a variety of DIY do it yourself lab testing services out there that in many cases either mail a kit to your home so like poop, urine, saliva, you can take care of all of that without even stepping out your front door. So for example, you know, like Direct Labs has, has a gut panel, like a three day gut panel where you just, you know, you poop in a little hot dog tray three days in a row and you mail it off with the FedEx prepaid label and within a couple of weeks you got a PDF in your email inbox with everything that's going on from like a bacteria and a yeast and a fungus standpoint. 23andMe would be a perfect example. You know, and DNA fit would be another example of companies where they send you a little tube. You do what you need to do to drip the saliva into the tube. For me, that would mean sniffing a jar of peanut butter. I found that's the, it's a really good way to make the saliva flow. You know, you don't really need much saliva. It takes like Five minutes. And then you can mail that off and get a picture of your DNA. Urine, same thing. There are companies that will mail the whole kit to your home to do. For example, one really good test is called a Dutch test, a dried urine test for hormones, where you literally just pee on a strip five times over a 24 hour period. Mail that strip off the lab and all of a sudden you get like a running tally of what's going on with your entire day's hormones, right? Your testosterone, your cortisol, your estrogen, et cetera. And it's way more accurate than even like these. You know, there's this test that a lot of, a lot of athletes actually know about. It's called the adrenal stress index test to see if you have adrenal fatigue. Well, the urine test, you know, blows that out of the water when it comes to accuracy. And the blood test, again, like Direct Labs would be an example of a company that will send you what is called a requisition form. You print off the requisition form and then you search for typically a lab in your area. In my case, you know, within 20 miles of my house, I got four different labs I can walk into with that form, slap it on the counter, they look at it, they take the blood, and then that goes off to the lab testing service. And again, within a, within a week or two, you've got a full PDF of like your, your, your cholesterol, your lipid panel, your thyroid, your inflammation markers, your minerals. Probably like the gold standard for that is a company called Wellness fx. And that's the one that I use just because I have a really slick online dashboard that keeps track of all my health parameters. And that company even has doctors on staff who'll get on the phone with you and walk you through your results. So those are some of the, some of the services that, that I use when it comes to, that I try and keep track of because I'm constantly testing and quantifying my body. You don't have to do it like, you know, you don't have to be like an, an anal self quantifier doing this stuff. Like, you know, every month I guinea pig things with myself, from supplements to exercises to weird diets. So I'm constantly testing my blood just so I can find out the information. But, you know, I keep track of most of this stuff. I have a website called Greenfield fitness systems@greenfield fitness systems.com and if you go there and click on labs, you can see what some of my favorite Labs are for a lot of this stuff. And you know, frankly, once you kind of get a handle on it, it's not that hard to quantify and even in many cases, never step into a doctor's office.

Yeah, definitely. That's awesome. Really valuable information you just shared. And I totally agree with you. I mean, when you're getting to a level of performance for many athletes that you're fine tuning, those little things makes massive changes. But it's even more important when you're not at that level of athlete. I mean, imagine those little changes can make a massive difference in your health, your wellness, how you're handling your day and day to day life. So I think you're sharing some really valuable information that doesn't get shared to general public. So let's talk about the challenging yourself. What are some things that you do on a day to day basis to kind of remind yourself, like, okay, I get to go for that next challenge or on an annual basis, whatever your system is around creating that challenge in your life.

Sure. And I briefly mentioned that book Antifragile when I was talking about getting stuck in the comfort zone. But in that book they go into the concept of hormesis. This idea that little things that are pretty uncomfortable in small amounts are actually pretty dang good for your health. Like sunlight, ultraviolet radiation in large amounts can contribute to skin cancer, but in small sane amounts is actually quite healthy for everything from vitamin D to skin health to believe it or not, decreasing the risk of skin cancer. So I make sure that I get some type of UVA and UVB exposure during the day. Another one would be temperature fluctuations. Right. So every day I take an icy cold shower. And that's huge for everything from increasing pain tolerance to increasing the strength of your, what's called your vagus nerve, which is a really, really important component of your nervous system. It's good for nitric oxide, it's good for blood flow. And so I do a cold shower just about every day. And I even do like a cold soak or like a cold plunge a few times a week. I also use the sauna, right? Like so a few times a week I'll go to a sauna. I actually have a sauna built in my basement now because I got so into sauna and I just sit in there till I get really hot because the body produces a lot of heat shock proteins. Again, this is hormesis, right? If I stayed in there for two hours, I could die. But by staying in there just long enough to where I'm Feeling really hot. I'm getting a lot of the benefits of something that might be bad for me in high amounts. Another example would be something like exposure to the toxins that come from plants, right? Like the. The consumption of wild plants that are a little bit bitter. You know, things like kale and bok choy and even a lot of the. The wild vegetables that grow in the wilderness around my house. You know, like wild mint and. And plantain leaf and, you know, organ grape, and a lot of these things that taste a little bit bitter. Those are plant toxins, but they actually spark your body's own endogenous production of antioxidants and your body's own endogenous production of immune cells. And so by utilizing this concept of hormesis, right, like eating a lot of bitter wild plants and taking cold showers every day and doing a sauna a few times a week and getting plenty of sunlight exposure, I'm making my body and my brain stronger without necessarily doing damage to it. So, you know, the. When it. When it comes down to, if you want to look at this big picture, I try to do something somewhat uncomfortable each day. And again, it doesn't have to be physical. It can be mental, right? Like, it can be learning a new song on the guitar or the ukulele or sitting down at the piano and just learning, you know, like a C, E, D, E, F, G, and kind of like learning in what format those go. You know, doing something that makes my brain spin a little bit using, like, the. The NBAC brain training app that's free on the itunes store that. That challenges your brain and your working memory. Or perhaps, you know, reading a book that's very intellectually stimulating, that's outside the topic of health and fitness, right? Like fiction or finance or something that introduces me to new topics I'm not familiar with. But every day I try to do at least one thing that's uncomfortable, and then I. I try to take that to the next level. And about every quarter, I try to sign up for something that more or less scares the hell out of me, right? For some people, that might be an ironman triathlon. For some people, that might be, you know, a Spartan race. For some Spartans, it might be a spartan race that's longer than the kind of Spartan race that you usually do. For some people that might be a local, you know, like this January 1st, right? Like, they've got a lot of towns have, like, the cold water plunge. Maybe it's the cold water plunge. Maybe it's a fitness competition. Maybe it's just like signing up for a fricking Zumba class at the gym. But anything that you find to be super scary. And yes, again, that can be mental. It can include finding a local bar that has open mic night and signing up for that or learning going to a poetry slam night or submitting an essay to a local fiction writing magazine. Anything like that. Try each quarter. So that's four times a year to do something that just scares the hell out of you. And that's another way that you can really grow using this principle of hormesis.

Got it. So how is it that you consciously stay on top of that every quarter? I mean, look, it's one thing for once a year, people make a New Year's resolution, do something like outrageous or different or, you know, trying to go after for that next goal, next big achievement. And if you look at the research, you know, less than 10% actually make a New Year's resolution a reality. And it takes them about 10 years and then the other 90% forget about it after month one. So how do you, Is there a platform, is there a way that you keep that conscious and in the forefront of your mind?

Okay, so for me, I'm jaded because it's easy, right? Like, I'm in the health and fitness sector. I am constantly getting bombarded with emails from people who are like, come do this, come do that. So case in point for me, recently somebody emailed me about going and hiking across the Spartan trail in Greece, right, with a rucksack. And I think that's in May. And I saw that and I'm like, wow, that could be the thing I do in the spring that scares the hell out of me, right? And I don't.

Are you doing it?

I'm pretty free flowing. I'm, I'm, I'm like 80% doing it. Ash. I haven't committed yet, but it's definitely something that appeals to me. I'm not one of those guys that's like super duper type A, right? Like, I don't have a calendar where I'm like, oh, it's been, it's been 12 weeks. I didn't do the uncomfortable, scary thing. Instead it's one of those things where I'll sit down, usually for me, at the beginning of the year and kind of like map out 2017, look at some things that I find exciting, and I'll try and choose a small handful. And usually it comes out to about once a quarter of things that are pretty tough from a physical standpoint, right? Sometimes it's a hunt, sometimes it's a race, sometimes it's an adventure, sometimes it is, you know, an open mic night or something like that. And then I put that on the calendar. But I'm also a fan of, you know, the concept outlined in a, in a really great book called Just Enough, where you also look at life like a series of moving targets, right? Sometimes things are going to come across your plate that if you have painted yourself into your perfect type, a five year plan or ten year plan, you're going to miss out on a lot of cool opportunities just because you've already set up everything in advance and calendared everything. Instead, I give myself a basic idea and I live life by that rule of trying to throw in, trying to sprinkle in a handful of those scary things or those uncomfortable things and then I just kind of see what life throws at me, you know, and maybe that, that thing in, in Greece, right, Like hiking across the Spartan trail. Well, maybe somebody else will say, hey, we're going to do a, we're going to do a, a freediving spearfishing trip in, in Costa Rica in May. And then all of a sudden I'm like, well you know, maybe, maybe that also sounds a little bit scary, you know, diving down to 60ft and shooting fish. But you know, you, you kind of pick and choose what you want. So you know what, I'm pretty free flowing. I don't have any hard and fast rules for my calendaring system, frankly. I'm just a Google Calendar guy and I set up reminders in Google Calendar where I get the email sent to me each week. And yeah, that's about as fancy as I get with my calendaring system.

And how do you beat that resistance, that internal resistance that comes up? I mean, look, we all have that internal resistance no matter what you've challenged yourself with or haven't. I mean even I can just speak for myself personally. Even the dream of getting to Kona and then it happening and having to train again another six months with a newborn, I was just like, how is this gonna happen, that massive internal resistance? And I'll tell you what, going from like 25 to 30 hour training weeks before another Ironman's to going to like all of a sudden have to make it happen with no sleep, 10 hours working my butt off, launching another business, all this stuff I just. Huge internal resistance. Like, do I really want to do this? So how do you, how do you beat that? I mean that, you know, and that could be from across the board, right? Right on a couch today and wanting to get up and doing a run every day for one, you know. Yeah, it's a run or sprints, whatever you want to call it. You have that internal resistance that comes in.

For me, it's overcoming decision making fatigue using two methods. First of all, as much as this may sound like it contrasts with what I just said about painting yourself into a corner of like having a calendar. I do at the beginning of each week, write down a rough sketch of what the week's supposed to look like. And I frankly, I just use an Evernote document for that, right. Like Monday through Sunday, here's what the approximate workouts for the week are gonna look like. Now I have taken that to the next level and I actually do have a coach. You know, for me it's for Spartan racing where because I have a very busy schedule, what I do is I tell them, hey, tell me the key things I need to do this week, right? Like the key workouts that I need to finish by the end of the week. And then I just drag and drop those onto the days where I know I'm going to be able to do them during the week. And that way when I wake up in the morning, I at least can overcome a little bit of that decision making fatigue about, you know, what I'm supposed to do that day. Because for me, if it's written down and for a lot of humans, this is the case. If it's written down, you want to check it off. That's why checklists work so well. So that's a big, big part of it. You know, when you don't feel like getting out of bed at 6am, if you have no clue what you're going to do when you step into the gym or when you go outside and lace up your running shoes, you're probably going to have a pretty crappy workout or you're just not going to do it. But if you have a decent idea of and a plan of what it is that you're supposed to do, as simple and silly as this may seem, it does make a big difference. The other thing that I do is I've got standby workouts that I know I can do if I'm really fatigued. Two days ago I had super duper low sleep. I was supposed to do a strength training session. I knew I wanted to work my muscles. I knew it wasn't a cardio day. I knew I needed to go in and do something that, you know, worked my pulling and my pushing muscles for my Upper body and my lower body. But I didn't want to do the pretty physically demanding. It was basically almost like a powerlifting workout, right? I was supposed to do snatches and clean and jerks and cleans and deadlifts and some relatively complex movements that frankly, when you're fatigued and low on sleep, it's very easy to just like skip that workout and say, ah, I'm going to head over to Facebook or you know, watch, watch Shark Tank on Hulu or do something else. That for me is, is like appealing when I'm, when I'm tired and what I have in my back pocket are like some key workouts and literally just like a, a few papers on my desk that I'll pull out and, and in this case, for example, circuit like I'm a big fan of, of like circuits of easier exercises, like 10 different exercises that are relatively paddle palatable even when I'm tired, like mountain climber, body weight, squat walking lunges, Russian twists, things that really are not that complex and that are typically body weight. And I'll just string 10 of those together and be like, I'm just gonna do one set of 15 repetitions of each of these exercises. And at least if I can get through that, I'll do it. And then in many cases I'll go through all 10 and I'll be like, you know what, I could do that again. And so I'll do it again. And I have a few key workouts like that where I just know I can pull them out of my back pocket if I'm really fatigued and just do them. Another one is the is. And this one works really well for me when I'm traveling. It's just a walk breathing through my nose. That's it, right? Like if I've traveled, I'm jet lagged, I've landed where I'm going, I'm super tired. All I want to do is crash in my hotel bed and flip on the TV. I tell myself, okay, set the clock for 45 minutes, go outside and all you have to do is walk and breathe through your nose, right? And that's it. And honestly, sometimes that'll turn into like a kind of like a jog and then Finish up with 2 minutes of intervals and you'll. So sometimes just, just starting kind of like gets you through. But so I have those key workouts that I know I can do when there's a huge amount of resistance. It's, it's, for me it's, it's that way with Writing too. Like when I have that blank page, I don't want to write. I tell myself, three sentences, right? All you got to do is write three sentences. Because I'm working on a. On a fiction book right now, and I do have those days where I just don't want to write. So be three sentences. That or I set my stopwatch for 15 minutes, I turn off the Internet, and I just have that blank page in front of me. And I don't care what happens. Even if I write one word, I need to be there for 15 minutes. That's it. My brain can comprehend 15 minutes. Just like it can comprehend a 45 minute walk breathing through my nose. So those are some of the things that I do. As simple and silly as those may seem, those are my methods. They may not work for everybody, but they work for me.

Yeah. Thanks, man. Thanks for sharing that. That's awesome. It's like progressive, right? Once you just start, it becomes hard to stop because it just gets you moving. I think that's the challenge many people have is just that start just to make that shift happen right then and there. And I think that some of the tips that you shared are very incredible tips. I use some of those myself. Awesome. Well, you know what, we're approaching the end of our call, and I want to just thank you for jumping on and taking the opportunity to connect with me in the audience. Can you share with them a little bit about how they can reach out to you and connect with you? I'm sure some of them are going to want to connect with you directly.

Yeah, I do a podcast twice a week. You can find it on itunes or over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com where I've got articles and all sorts of stuff. And then for those, like all the lab tests and stuff I talked about, as well as anything I find that's interesting or notable, I usually put those over at greenfield fitness systems.com and I have a book. It's like 500 pages jam packed with just biohacks for brain and digestion and sleep and fat loss and stuff like that. That's at beyond training book.com or if you're lazy and you don't like URLs and you have poor memory, just Google Ben Greenfield and hopefully I'll be up there as one of the first hits and you could just go from there.

Awesome. Ben, thanks again. Thanks for jumping on and share with us. Hang with me while I sign off real quick.

Sweet.

There you go. You heard it from the human master himself. Ben Greenfield. He's got some incredible tips. Be sure to click on some of the links that are available here to connect with him directly. He shared a number of great tips on how you can completely shift wherever you may be today, whether that's on a couch or you are an Ironman athlete. You can definitely take some of the tests, improve your performance. You can definitely challenge yourself adopting some new methods. And he shared with us some of his ways that he gets over that personal hurdle that we all face, those personal voices inside that just may hold us back from making that shift, making that change so that you can have that premier performance that's available to all of us. Thanks for joining again. Be sure to stay tuned for my next email so that you get access to our next interview. I look forward to seeing you next time. Thanks for joining us at Get Fit Summit. See you next time. Have a great day.

You've been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast. Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness and performance advice.

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