What’s Better Running or Walking for Midlife Fat Loss (and why)

Real quick, before we dive into this episode, I have a little sleep secret I want to tell you about. Look, sleep is crucial for your fitness, but it's crucial for just plain old everyday life and function. And I find I sleep great unless I have a migraine. And I've had more than my fair share since perimenopause all the way through postmenopause. My secret weapon was Blue Sky CBD sleep gels. Each gel contains 25mg of CBD and 25mg CBN for deep restorative sleep. Something about it helps to reduce inflammation, which I believe for me was key in helping me get to sleep. But the biggest thing is so many of the over-the-counter solutions, whether for sleep or migraines, can ruin gut health, and liver health. Neither one of those did I want to be problematic for me. So this option is recommended by healthcare providers worldwide and backed by thousands of happy customers, many of whom come from our Flipping 50 community. There is zero THC, so it's non-habit-forming. It's made by a trusted family-owned company that we all can feel good about. Third-party tested for purity and potency. And if you're interested, you too can try a sample for just $6. But even better, you can get 30% off forever with discount code FLIPPING50. That's FLIPPING50. Just go to flipping50.com/blueskycbd. We'll put that link in the show notes and you'll find it everywhere on Flipping 50 at My Favorites. What are you waiting for? Good night. Is walking really the new running? Why is walking for midlife fat loss seemingly working so well? Could it work for you? We're diving into this during this episode with a very special guest. Look, fitness celebs like Chalene Johnson of Beachbody and PiYo found walking and weight training combined to give her the best results in midlife. I've shared, and I'll link to, two episodes shared recently linking the benefits of walking to both my personal experience and science-based results from walking. And what about you? Still a once runner wishing you could get back there? I get you. But should you? Is it the best way and/or the fastest track to fitness? Pun intended, by the way. How do you return to running if you really love it and want to? All that inside and more. A once elite athlete joins us today to share his thoughts. I'm Debra Atkinson, and you're listening to Flipping 50. I started this podcast over a decade ago to answer questions about fitness and menopause and beyond before you know to ask them. The goal: to help accelerate your results with the science and the practical application of proven protocols while living your best life. There's no more powerful health influencer in the world than a midlife woman. It's not just you, but it's the 3 generations that you influence. My unique 40-year career, including being a university senior lecturer in kinesiology, an industry subject matter expert, an international speaker, to founder of the first and the only exclusively made-for-menopause-and-beyond fitness membership in the world. Every week I interview experts behind the science of optimal hormone-balancing fitness and longevity and share answers answers to our community's questions so you can have the vitality and the energy you want, need, and deserve. My guest today is Brad Kearns, Mark Sisson's co-author on the Keto Reset Diet. He boasts a diverse athletic career as a U.S. national champion triathlete and Guinness Book World Record speed golfer. His B— .RAD podcast is a top-ranked Apple Podcast favorite in the fitness category, showcasing his dedication to fitness and health innovation. And he doesn't need any more introduction than that. I think you're going to love this episode. Brad Kearns, thanks so much for being here.

Oh my gosh, Debra, I can't wait to flip 50 with you and get into all these important matters of how to exercise and pursue fitness goals properly and lead a healthy, active lifestyle.

First of all, I have to ask you, this yellow shirt, I love it. So it like exudes energy. Is this a brand color? Is this just Brad? What is this?

Well, since you asked, it really, it started as an ode to Ali G, who is the Sacha Baron Cohen character, the fake rapper that had shows and movies. You're probably familiar with Borat, who was his other character and had popular movies. So, um, He was a fake character and then everyone knows him now because he's— he got exposed. So he'll never be— Ollie G will never be with us again. So I have to wear yellow to honor him.

Okay. All right. Well, now I have to start in this way. So we have a very, a very nosy audience. We like to know the dirt. We like to know the backstory of everybody. And we usually ask our female guests because it's so relevant. How old they are. So it's only fair. Can I ask?

Oh my gosh. I'm so excited to report that I'm almost 60 because my current athletic passion is master's track and field competition. So I move into the, the 60+ age group from the 55 to 59, and I am going to go after those wrinkly hunched over old men. They are in trouble when I come out there and do my high jumping and my 400 meters. So there's a lot of benefits to aging, especially when you fight that battle and try to do it gracefully. And delay the inevitable. And I think what we see around us instead is this norm of accelerated aging driven by adverse lifestyle practices. So I don't want to participate in any of that. I was talking the other day with my doctor friend and we've become obsessed with the Social Security Administration's Actuarial Life Tables chart. You can Google and find this thing. And since we're both around 60, he said, you know, look at line whatever on the chart, column this. And he concluded that by the time we're 80, half of our friends will be gone according to statistical norms. And that is just mind-blowing to think where I'm celebrating all these 60th birthdays with my buddies and going to parties. So I don't want to be any part of those dismal statistics, but it's right there in our face unless we do something about it.

So good. And you know, I got really lucky. My mom lived to be 95. But over and over again, she had married my stepdad, 10 years older than her, and lived in a small town. So many of her friends were older, and she watched one after the other after the other pass away. I kept saying, Mom, you gotta get younger friends. You gotta start making younger friends. And, and so it sounds like this is still ringing true for us.

Oh my gosh, you know, my dad, who lived a great run to age 97, 95 of those years were super awesome and energetic, and he was champion golfer till the end, but he went through two entire sets of golf buddies, and it was pretty wild to see. And also, when you're 97, you don't have many peers left. In fact, he had zero, to my remembrance. So, if it's, you know, someone's got to do it, we got to carry the torch. But I think when you surround yourself with good influence and listen to good podcasts and, you know, formulate different beliefs, I believe that I'm going to sail to 100. Without any trouble, and then I'll start working on some action plans to make it to 110. I'm also interesting with this anecdote that today on the globe, do you know how many people over 100 are today in the world? Yes.

No, I do not.

Uh, I'll give you a second to guess, listeners, and then I'm going to tell you there's around half a million people that are over 100 right now on the planet.

Really?

Now here's another interesting one. You know how many people are over 110?

Not a clue.

So there's half a million that have reached 100 and 219 or something like that are over 110. So it seems like, you know, the organs and systems of the body are gonna wear out somewhere after 100 years. But I don't think there's any reason why we shouldn't all expect, if we do the right thing and take advantage of medical support, advanced medical support when we need it, we should be able to sail to 100 unless we get into our own way. That's my belief system, rather than thinking, oh, I hope I'm not one of half of my friends that are gone in the next 20 years.

Yeah. So I have a question on this. You may or may not know the answer, so I'm putting you up against the wall here. But so in those, those people who die somewhere between, say, 100 and 110, do we know what they're dying of? Are they just peacefully going to sleep, not waking up, or they are they chronic diseases as we see, you know, for those who are 60 and 70 often?

Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. Uh, there's this concept of compressing the morbidity curve, and what that means is whatever you're going to die of, you want to stave it off as long as possible so that you drop— we used to make these t-shirts, uh, when we had Primal Con retreats, Mark Sisson and I, and the graph said, live long, drop dead, and it had a line and then a steep drop down. And I'm kind of referencing my father as a great example because he had great years. And then in the last two, he started to get more tired. He slowed down, his cognition slowed down around the same pace as his body slowed down. And so he would take longer and longer naps and shorter and shorter walks. And it was like, of course it's inevitable. And there, there's not going to be a lot of, you know, sadness or, or mourning when someone makes it to 97. But it was like, hey, this is all we could wish for to get out there, and then things will happen quickly when the time comes, rather than, oh, you're diagnosed with early dementia at age 63 and you, you suffer and you yell at people for 15 years. That's the worst thing that we could possibly imagine, or being in a wheelchair or just losing that quality of life due to largely preventable, you know, the accumulation of behaviors that are adverse and highly preventable. We have, we have control is the point.

Yeah, so, so, so good. Such good points too. And I, although I'm, I'm gonna maybe have to contest that there's no tears in mourning because, you know, 95 I think is a good run too, but there were plenty of tears, you know. So if there was plenty of love, there's plenty of tears. Um, let me ask you this. So I know we're talking about running, walking, and we're going to talk a little bit about the common denominator we both have of a little, uh, or a lot of endurance in our background. And maybe where we are now and, and how we've deviated from that a little bit. But do you focus— I know you're working with Mark— do you focus mostly on males, on females, on a mixed party? And what's the difference if you do look at them and separate?

Well, of course there's a whole bunch of differences to respect, but I think my main focus is getting on this big picture where we, like I said, form new belief systems rather than look at around us and think that, you know, normal aging is what we're seeing, which we're absolutely not. And, you know, beyond those, there's particulars and specifics for every individual too, and what works best for them. Male and female would be driving factors on that. But overall, if we can focus on things like, you know, cleaning up one's diet before we debate the pros and cons of the latest fad diet and you know, I've been in this game, Debra, writing books about the ketogenic diet and about fasting and about the primal eating patterns and all that stuff's great when you're really striving to go from level 8 to level 9. But for the most part, and for the vast majority of people, we're just trying to, like I say, get out of our own way and perhaps go from level 3 to level 6. Because if your pantry and your freezer is still stocked with, you know, all these processed nutrient deficient foods, or if you somehow can't seem to even get out and accomplish a bare minimum of exercise and muscular loading and things like that, there's, there's not really much else worth talking about. And I think we get caught up in our heads a lot and thinking about these strategies and, you know, joining different camps and debating and forming fixed and rigid beliefs, but not really acting them out in daily life. So it's like people ask, what's the best type of strength training protocol? And the answer is for sure, no one can argue this. It's the one that you enjoy most and that you'll adhere to over the long term.

Yeah, great point. And so I'm going to open up this wild can of worms and conversation that, that also is right in tandem with what you've just said, you know, which is better, running or walking? And, and when is one better than the other, or who is one better for? And all of those better and best and always You know, if you're writing a test question, that's a red flag, right? So, so we already know the answer somewhat to it, but I think that I speak for a lot of women in my audience listening who would have guilted themselves. In fact, as a fitness professional for years, I remember I would often sit down or I'd listen to somebody talking, and the one of the first things they would say was Well, I can't run. And no one, nowhere in the conversation had ever said you should be running. But often they think that that, that is what they should have been doing for some reason, media or whoever. So talk a little, speak into running versus walking and your recommendations or thoughts based on research of, you know, what you've seen and done. Over the years? Have your thoughts changed?

Thanks. Um, you know, the, the should be running is from billions of dollars of marketing messaging shoved down our throats to the fitness community and, you know, selling this idea that you have to struggle and suffer to get fit and accumulate volume and all these things that are a fixture in the endurance community. So if you can get rid of the word should, then you have an opening to develop an optimal fitness program and lifestyle where you're not looking over your shoulder or motivated, you know, impurely. Now, the best way to develop cardiovascular system and aerobic conditioning is through low-intensity exercise that emphasizes fat burning. These are not just opinions of one coach or one athlete, but exercise physiology confirms that, you know, developing your fat-burning capabilities is how you develop endurance. And this is done at comfortable, comfortable intensity where fat is the preferred source of fuel or the, you know, most emphasized. So we have this concept now that we call fat max heart rate. It's also called MAF heart rate or zone 2 maximum heart rate. And what it conveys is the maximum rate of fat burning calories per minute. So whatever intensity level that represents when you're burning the most fat calories per minute, if you were to speed up, Of course, you're gonna burn more calories and the faster you go, you burn more calories sprinting than you do brisk walking or jogging, right? Mm-hmm. But there's a certain point where your fat burning peaks and then if you speed up, your fat burning rate drops in favor of a significant spike in burning glucose calories because the effort is, uh, too difficult to sustain. You don't have enough oxygen and the mitochondria can't, uh, preferentially burn fatty acids. So you're now calling into sugar burning because you're going faster than that fat burning limit. That also brings in a more stressful and challenging workout with more stress hormones, a little bit of, uh, waste products building up in the muscles and longer time to recover from. So you go from an appropriate fat burning workout that's energizing and refreshing and it makes you feel good and alert all day to a workout that's slightly to significantly too stressful, depending on how much further you go beyond your fat burning limit. And that is essentially what the vast majority of fitness enthusiasts are doing when they go out there and do steady state cardio. And you see them on the stair machine at the, at the club, and they're sweating profusely and they're, they're showing the strain on their face, or the person that you see in the park jogging down the trail. And that's been a big fat You know, a massive failure for decades telling people to go push themselves in the name of top-rated goals like losing excess body fat. So now it's asserted by science that your exercise calories burned don't really contribute that well to fat reduction, especially when they're steady-state cardio and especially when the intensity level is too high. What it does is put you in overly stressful lifestyle patterns when you count all the other stress factors in your life and actually a propensity to, uh, add the health-destructive visceral fat around the belly and catabolize muscle tissue. So you become the skinny fat physique that everyone dreads where you're, you look soft, but you don't have a lot of muscle tone, but you're able to go and jog 10 kilometers and feel like you're contributing to your goals, but you're actually just contributing to increased appetite and increased laziness throughout the day because the workout was slightly too stressful because it went beyond fat burning capacity.

So true. And so there's two things here though, physiology-wise, I want to emphasize. One is, so percent of fat burned for fuel at lower levels is what we're talking about when you go out and you go for a walk and you go at a comfortable pace. So you're not going at a Great Dane's pace necessarily, you're going at the toy poodle pace, right? So, and you're just enjoying yourself. And then there's, you know, that middle zone, and that is that, you know, you get on it and you go. And that is, that is what every woman here listening learned in the '80s, like, get yourself into this target heart rate zone. And if it's not there, and if it's too high, God forbid, that would be terrible. You're not supposed to get out of that zone either. You know, but then there's the, what are your thoughts on high-intensity interval training for the person who's truly getting breathless in a short amount of time and truly recovering? The, the percent of fat for fuel is lower, but the total calories is higher. And when you take a small percent of a bigger number, you still end up getting some significant fat burn. And there's that afterburn Speak into that a little bit and the value of that. Hey, this is Debra Atkinson. I love creating the Flipping 50 podcast for you, and I have for over a decade. I also love helping midlife women shift not only their physical energy, but their beliefs about what effective exercise looks like and how much it can positively and powerfully impact your life. How you menopause and exercise in menopause determines how you will live, not just now, but decades from now. If you're not exercising right now, you're getting tired, not stronger, or you think you don't have time or the energy to exercise, do a 5-day flip with me. I'll send you one short video a day for 5 days. It's just 15 to 20 minutes long, so you can see exactly how I plan out a fitness plan for myself and for thousands of clients I've worked with. You can get this at flipping 50.com right now. What are you waiting for? Let's start Flipping 50 together.

I mean, this is the ancestrally aligned fitness program that we've been touting for so many years, where we move around frequently every day at a comfortable pace, and that includes walking around and being active, as well as a properly structured steady-state cardio session, which is low intensity. So that's developing your fat-burning capabilities. You might not be burning a ton of calories, but it's teaching you to be a fat burner with steady energy, appetite, and satiety hormones. Then—

and notably, just, just sorry to interject, but because you're under that threshold of where you're causing your body tons of stress, right, which is such a benefit for the women listening. Sorry.

So the answer is, how much should you do with that? The more the better, right? If we decide next summer to take take a break from podcasting and hike the Appalachian Trail for 2,000 miles, going 6 hours a day at a very comfortable pace. We're in nature, we're enjoying the sun, we're having campfires, and everything's super healthy, right?

Uh, then you lost me at camping, but I was heading—

yeah, okay, we'll get picked up and, uh, go glamping, uh, all supported with the burros carrying the food. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, now the other slice of pie on the fitness picture here is pushing that high end and, and maintaining and developing the anaerobic system and the explosive system. And this is what we lose when we age. So we start to lose our balance. We start to lose our power. That's how falling occurs is that initial reaction where you need to support your body weight with one quick step. But if you're just an aerobic machine that does the stair machine every day, Hey, it's better than sitting on the couch, but we also have to challenge those muscles and put them under resistance load and perform brief near all-out efforts. I'm not saying sprinting on the ground if you're not adapted yet, but you can sprint on a bicycle, a rowing machine, an elliptical. You can sprint in the swimming pool, but you wanna push the body toward maximum for very short duration and a lot of rest in between these efforts. And you don't do that many efforts. The anaerobic system responds corresponds to high intensity, extensive rest, and infrequent bouts so that you can rest and recover after. It's the opposite of like endurance training where you wanna be consistent and you wanna train every day and you put in more hours and you get better and that kind of mentality. So we have to hit all those buttons if we're trying to get maximum longevity and disease prevention benefits. And what happens as you describe the person that's going out there and going a little bit too hard every day, There's no energy left to pick up a weight or head over to the gym to do, you know, a brief set of sprints on the bicycle, which can deliver return on investment for like fat loss goals and things like that, a vastly superior return on investment for workouts that last 5, 10, or 20 times as long.

Love it. Yeah. Such a great description. When, if so, I will get women who have had a relationship. I would say this is their status on Facebook: in a relationship with running, like in a relationship, you know, and they loved it. There was a time in their life when it worked for them and maybe was the way of negating stress for their life. And then they want to return to that, you know? And I think I always think anybody who starts a sentence with, I want to get back to, and I'm like, oh, we're not going there. Like, we can't go there. You know, but, you know, they want to get back to that time where they could just go out on cruise control and then come back and their stressors were still there, but they dealt with them better. Is there a time, or how would you help a listener determine, is running going to work for me, or when is that really not my optimal choice anymore, or for now?

Yeah, good question. So we have to go back to that fat max heart rate, right? Anything at or below fat max is going to contribute to your aerobic development with a minimal amount of stress impact and need for recovery afterward, like the Appalachian Trail. Now, um, can you do a medium walk, a brisk walk, a slow jog, a medium jog? It all depends on your fat max heart rate. And the best way to estimate that— you can do it in a lab breathing through the tubes and all that, but Dr. Maffetone's widely respected formula is 180 minus your age in beats per minute. So on the Flippin 50 show, we can, uh, put an example of 50. Someone who's 50 years old will have a fat max heart rate estimated at around 130 beats per minute. So when you monitor that and carefully respect that at the vast majority of all your steady state cardiovascular minutes that you exercise, you are going to feel good and you're gonna develop without the interruption from breakdown, burnout, illness, and injury that is so common amongst hardcore endurance exercisers and cardio freaks at the gym. And so what it's also going to allow you to do is dedicate another portion of your energy expenditure budget to the strength training that's so important for— speaking of body composition, this is all, you know, widely accepted and agreed now that lifting weights is a much better way to get toned and sculpted and drop excess body fat fat, as is sprinting, where the benefits are, um, so enormous. And in particular, uh, tackling that challenge of the spare tire around the middle, uh, sprinting preferentially burns visceral fat. It, uh, develops more brain-derived neurotropic factor, and you just turn into an active, energetic, lean, mean human when you sprinkle in even a little bit of sprinting goes a long way. There's this concept you probably talk about on the show of excess post-exercise oxygen consumption. Meaning that a sprint workout where you're only working hard for an accumulated couple minutes, and the whole workout only takes 20 minutes with warmup and cool down, will affect your metabolism in a positive way for the next 48 or 72 hours. So you'll be a fat-burning machine because you do that comfortable low-intensity exercise that emphasizes fat burning, and then you go slam some challenging sessions. That don't prompt an excessive stress response because they're short in duration. And that's what the body responds to is brief fight or flight stimulation, and then a lot of rest and recovery in between hard efforts with a baseline of plenty of low-level movement. And so with the title of the book, Born to Walk, what we're talking about is getting away from the flawed marketing dogma of the running boom and the shoe manufacturers telling you that mileage is the key to keeping your weight correct, or to excelling as a fitness person and instead realizing that our true calling and the most critical objective for health, it's right up there with sleeping enough, is moving frequently throughout the day and walking extensively. And the huge distinction between walking and running, you asked this question early on, is walking has, there's no impact trauma. The maximum impact of walking is 1 times body weight 'cause 1 foot's on the ground at all times. That's the definition of walking. Versus running where there's 2 feet in the air at the same time. It's called the flight phase of running. And even a casual jogger going at a slow pace will impart 2 to 3 times body weight impact per stride. And so on, on a casual 5-mile jog at a slow pace, that's 2.3 million pounds of impact force going into your lower extremities, which is why the research shows that half of all regular runners are injured every year. And 25% of all regular runners are injured at any given time. So it's, it's people going out there, well-meaning, motivated, disciplined, and getting injured and burnt out and adding belly fat instead of dropping fat and looking, uh, slim and, and lean like they're hoping to.

So, so good. So many things in there to unpack. I wanna go way back just for a second. So, When you talk about the formula, so 180 minus age as a paper formula, you know, and my audience has heard me say, you know, that for any adult over 40, an estimate on paper can either over or under, but generally tends to underestimate where they need to be. So another way to do that, Brad, I've had people do like a bulky treadmill test, and really the most important thing there is it's repeatable and consistent, and they're just looking for where's that place where you have to take that first deep breath, like you actually see your ribs exchange or expand, or someone watching you does, and you have to do that. That, that would be okay, mark your— where's your heart rate right now? Would you agree with that?

Yeah, in the, in the exercise physiology laboratory, and you read these, uh, boring studies, but they The fat max heart rate is correlated with a spike in ventilation, and it goes like this on the graph. And the layperson's method would be nasal breathing, because if you're walking along at a brisk pace, or if you're super fit and you're jogging along, you should be able to breathe through your nose. But the moment you have to open your mouth to get more air is a good suggestion that you're getting up to that point where you're slightly behind on oxygen and you're going to start kicking into more sugar burning. The problem with most endurance athletes that I've associated with for decades now is it's very, very frustrating to set that beeper alarm and realize how flippin' slow 130 beats per minute is. And for the vast majority of runners, and we can determine this by average marathon finishing times on the globe, the average time is 4:30, which is a 10:18 pace per mile. This suggests that the best training pace for the vast majority of marathon runners who are pretty accomplished people, they're running 26 miles, not a 5K, would be somewhere in the brisk walk category, maybe a little bit of slow jogging. And so you think, gee, how the heck am I gonna get in shape to perform and beat my time at the next marathon when I'm supposed to be, when I'm brisk walking instead of jogging? But this is how, the human physiology works and how you get better and better if you discipline yourself and adhere to the proper training regimen. What happens is today you might be out there for a brisk walk and your heart rate starts beeping at 130, but 6 months from now, you'll be able to break into a nice soft jog and maintain that same heart rate of 129 as you show improvement in your aerobic conditioning and your fat-burning capacity. And that's the essence of, of training and improving for endurance sports. I mean, how do you train for the Ironman and complete it? You have to get more and more efficient over time so that you don't poop out after 10 miles like your next-door neighbor might if you said, hey, come on my training ride, I'm doing 100 today, let's see how long you can last. And the average person will blow out all their sugar stores and be exhausted after 13 miles of pedaling because they're, they're not conditioned to go longer and they they can't stay in the fat-burning zone. They're just blowing out all their energy because the effort's so, so difficult.

So good. Yeah, and I spent about 6 and a half years living in Boulder, Colorado, and I was working at and working out at a club where Frank Shorter was next to me most days. And I mean most days I was there, he was there every day, often twice a day. Still But I sat down with him and interviewed him a couple of times. And, and for anybody who's not aware— where have you been? What rock are you under? But Frank Shorter won the Munich Marathon, the first time marathon was in the Olympics, in 1972. And he said basically he was the first person who ran the marathon like a race. He said, I did very little fast effort training. It was all slow and low. And that's the base, the importance of it.

Yeah. I mean, what's funny when you're in Boulder and looking around and seeing these world-class athletes amongst you, dozens of them in triathlon and running, is it looks like Frank Shorter is running very fast in training. And indeed, he is by any measure. However, his heart rate is in the aerobic zone. So the equivalent of Frank Shorter running 6:30 pace per mile at high altitude would be for the average person, a medium to brisk walk. And that's what we have to respect. We wanna honor the example set by the greatest athletes on the planet and train in a similar philosophy. But it's going to correlate that beeper and your watch does not lie. And so however hard your heart is working and what your metabolic fuel source is, That is determining whether the workout can be destructive, like you asked earlier, or whether it's beneficial and you can thrive in that approach and also have, again, the energy left over to do some sprints, to do some strength training and become, you know, resilient and strong and have total body functional fitness for longevity rather than just being an endurance freak that can run in a straight line for 6 miles or 13 miles or 26 miles.

So good. Awesome. Great conversation. So a woman thinking, okay, you're talking about walking. One of the first things that we like is some kind of a goal line or a finish line. You know, a lot of women want to know how many steps should I actually be getting, you know, or how many miles or for how long. So if we, if we look at steps, because right now this seems like it's, it's come up And then it's gone down and now it's up. Like we're all talking about, get your steps in, get your steps in. So where, where are you on this? How many steps? How would you answer that question?

Well, one thing I love to point out when we did the research in the book, and this is in a little anecdote, is this 10,000 steps a day did not come from scientific research. It can be traced back to an ad for a pedometer made by a Japanese company in 1964, when they released this unique contraption that could measure your steps.. And in Japanese language, the character for 10,000 resembles a walking person. You can Google it and say, uh, 10,000 in Japanese, and it's a person taking a stride. And so the pedometer company thought it was clever to put the 10,000 walking person up there to market and promote their device. And that is why we have the recommendation of 10,000 steps a day.

Now, um, that was a mic drop, you all.

Okay, so yeah, Google it right now, people.

You'll, you'll little get-together, you're going to be the most popular person in the room.

You can make it your little signature emoji with the end of your emails. Yeah. Signing off with the 10,000 steps. The one issue I have with that is it can be kind of intimidating for the average person who looks, opens up their watch or their, their phone and says, oh, I only took 2,300. So the point I like to make on this matter is that every little thing counts tremendously toward your aggregate total of living a long, happy, healthy life. So if you can get up and take 2-minute breaks from work and do that every hour or so, and we talk 365 days from now, that is gonna have a massive beneficial impact on your cognitive performance, on your body composition, on your habit forming, and all these things. So there's no such thing as too little of an exercise bout. I call 'em micro workouts, where I have videos on YouTube, Brad Kearns micro workouts. You can see, I show myself heading out to the garbage bin with a bag and I go past my hexagonal deadlift bar on the side yard and I say, my rule is when it's time to throw the garbage out, I, I drop for one set of hex bar. It's not counted as a workout. It's not going to ruin my session for the next day. And similarly, whenever I see a flight of stairs, my rule is I do the fast feet drill like a sprinter and I rush up the stairs rather than just walk up normally. And it's become habit now. And it's not of big consequence, but these things definitely add up over time. My other favorite example is if you have a dog, you've made a commitment to take care of that animal. The dog deserves to get out twice a day. Otherwise, they'll bark during a podcast and disrupt the listening in the background.

Just kidding. Did you just hear that?

Love those guys in the background. They're always welcome on the show. I'm not the slightest bit disturbed. I just want to say hi to them and and even be more distracted.

I'm kind of disturbed.

That's okay. But, you know, these things, you got to think beyond yourself and your flimsy things, flimsy powerful things like motivation and willpower, and just know that that dog gets out twice a day, whether it's mud, rain, sleet, or snow. And when you start building these things into your life, you stop worrying about your step count, and it just becomes a natural consequence where you don't even have to to look at the report. You just know you're an active, healthy, energetic person. That said, because we have so many built-in comforts, conveniences, and things that are pushing us away from an active lifestyle, it does warrant getting into a regimented fitness program and, and joining up with other people that support your goals or, or getting out of your home environment and driving over to the gym and, you know, making those sort of commitments and putting yourself in position to succeed. But I've, I've associated with people, family, friends, loved ones, who you can feel that sense of discouragement when they're sharing that they're not out there getting enough exercise. And especially during the pandemic, people are saying like, well, I got out of shape and gained 12 pounds because my gym was closed. And I'm like, excuse me, what? Wait, wait, are you blaming the gym being closed? Because I prefer working out outdoors and going to a gym anyway. I didn't— my routine didn't change at all during the pandemic. I was out on the trails and I was in my backyard and I was doing, uh, you know, push-ups off the bench at the park or whatever was around.

So good. Yeah, and such a great point, I think, for, you know, anybody. We're not certainly picking on you, but just pointing out it is so much easier than you think, and, and it doesn't have to be hard. And I think that is part of what's associated with going to the gym. The gym is closed, or I couldn't go to the gym. We— first of all, there's two things hard about that. One is the getting there, like the having to go and commute, as opposed to just having a few things you can do, you know, or standing up and doing 10 air squats, you know, every half an hour throughout the day. And if you have bad knees, I know you're thinking, okay, we can't do— but there is something that you can do, whatever that thing is. So making it easy, making it accessible, and I think the biggest thing is letting yourself be successful. Don't move the finish line before you get there.

Yeah, I mean, number one bestselling book in the world the last two years is Atomic Habits by James Clear. And one of his big points is set these, these goals that are easily achievable and sometimes ridiculously easy to commit to. So it's like, hey, can you walk for one minute every hour and get up from your desk and walk down the hall and walk back? Of course I can. That's nothing. But if you can actually do it, then you have these little successes and you build bigger habits from the little ones.

Mm-hmm. So good. So we, we all need to get our hands on this book because we've heard all the little details about walking. And yet I can look back at, say, my last 5 days and say, yeah, it was— seemed like a good idea every day, you know. And 2 of those days I actually got a good walk. But other days, what'd I do? You know, what did I let get in the way? So I think Anytime you can read a book that gives you some science to reinforce and amplify the reasons you already have in your head, you do want to do this, just gives you a little bit more motivation, gives you the, you know, at this age we like to know the why, not, not just the how, but why am I doing that again? I think all that matters. Where can we get our hands on the book or any other little goodies that you might have to go with it?

I think a great place to visit is borntowalkbook.com, and we have wonderful pre-order promotion going where you get free PDF downloads and discount coupons for ordering and a tremendous amount of detailed information about the book, including a series of free PDF downloads with commentary about how to lose that visceral fat, you know, how to, how to designate the proper pace for your cardiovascular exercise, and a lot of content that'll get you excited to, to order this book and hopefully, you know, shake up some of these foundational notions of the fitness industry that are flawed and dated, especially promoting this struggle and suffer approach where, you know, calorie burning is supposed to equal feeling great and losing weight. And it's just really a dismal failure when when people are getting injured at that kind of rate. And the attrition rate is so high when it comes to the, the group training programs and things like that. And we end up seeing people with, you know, a finisher medal on the wall from 2011. And you say, oh, that's great. You ran a half marathon. Uh, what do you do now? Well, I don't do much because the thing exhausted the crap out of me and I, I don't want to go near, you know, that, that scene anymore. So that's not what we're looking for when we're talking lifelong functional fitness.

So good. Brad Kearns, co-author with Mark Sisson in Born to Walk, thank you so much for being here.

Thank you, Debra. Keep up the good work. Keep Flipping 50.

Thank you so much for listening. To listen and access a decade of episodes and the show notes, visit flipping50.com, where you'll be able to find all of our prior episodes, and I made it easy for you to make the most of your listening time by selecting 5 specific areas most commonly high priorities for our community and giving you top 10 lists if you let me know you'd love them. If you know a midlife woman or a soon-to-be one who wants to optimize her midlife energy and time with the right exercise and lifestyle changes and a mindset shift about just what is possible, share this podcast with her and I thank you. There is no more powerful health influencer in the world than you, midlife woman.