Play, Fitness & The Exuberant Animal with Frank Forencich

Welcome to Mama Goddess. I'm your host, Alexandra J. Johnson. This podcast is all about rocking your goddess life, creating vibrant health and celebrating motherhood and family life. It's about living an authentically awesome life. Let's have some fun. And we have a fantastic guest today, as always, Frank Vorsich. Frankforn Sitch. I had to practice that before I started. So Frank has literally been in the health and fitness arena for 30 years, and he is an internationally recognized leader in performance training and health education. And he has written many books and let me get them right, the author of Exuberant Animal, Change youe Body, Change the World, Stress, craft, and also play as if your life depends on it. And he's a fantastic writer and I am thrilled to be chatting with him about pleasure and fitness and health today. So welcome, Frank.

Thank you. Glad to be here.

I'm very excited and I'd love to hear how you have become who you are now the last 30 years. How did you come up with exuberant animal? I know that's one of your phrases and your website. So can you tell us what is the exuberant animal? And who are you?

Well, I am sort of a recovering fitness addict, I suppose you might say. But my journey has been. When I was a child, I was really sick. I had a lot of vague ailments of allergies and digestive problems, and I missed a lot of school and I couldn't keep up with my peers physically. So when I was in junior high, I got involved in swimming and later in water polo, and that completely changed my life. I went from being very physically incompetent to being able to swim and play water polo with my peers. And the transformation had a real profound effect on me. And I became kind of an exercise omnivore after that. I was into everything and it didn't matter. I was insatiable about it. And I got involved in martial arts. I got involved in rock climbing. I grew up in California, so that was the perfect area for that. And when I went to Stanford, I studied human biology, which turned out to be a stroke of great luck because human biology is a multidisciplinary study, and it allowed me to look at the body and look at health from a lot of different perspectives. And that was very enriching. Gave me the impetus to go to Africa to study human evolution and take a real big picture look at the history of the body. So that's how I got to be exuberant animal.

Very cool. So tell me what exuberant means. And what does animal mean for you?

Well, you could look at the word exuberance as the spiritual, the mind, body, the psycho spiritual aspect of this. And then the animal part, that's our biological nature. And it's a nice fit, it's a nice combination. The two words really imply kind of a holistic point of view, because we can look at our ancestry, we can look at where our bodies came from, we can look at our heritage as mammals and primates and hominids, so this long, deep history as animals. And then we can look at our exuberance and the pleasure that we take from moving our bodies, especially in the natural world and especially with each other. So it turned out to be a nice choice of words.

Yeah, I love it. I love that word, exuberance, an animal. Because a lot of times we don't associate ourselves as animals, but we need to be healthy, good animals. Right. If we're going to be happy.

Right. And in fact, I've played around with a lot of these definitions that you hear of health. And we, especially in the corporate world, a lot of people struggle with trying to define what health is or what wellness is. And there's a lot of wheel spinning on this. And I've taken to saying that health is an animal. And when you start to look at it that way now, okay, the animal has certain needs and the animal lives and grows and we take care of the animal, we take care of ourselves. So I find that to be a nice definition.

Yeah, I love that. So what do you think is what's going on with our health and fitness as well? You know, because for so many people, men, women, they don't really love fitness, they don't love health. And, like, it's a chore to, you know, it's like, I've got to exercise and nobody, you know, not that many people are that exuberant about it.

Right, right. And part of that could be explained by looking at our evolution. When I went to Africa and I hung out, I spent a little bit of time with a couple of indigenous tribes, the Hadza Bushmen in Tanzania. And you look at the environment and the challenges that you face living in a primal environment. On the ground, it's hot, it's dangerous, there's not much food. And the idea of exercise just wouldn't come up because you conserve your energy, you walk, you hunt, you run as necessary to gather the food that you need or to escape from predators, and that's it. And then you go back to camp and you relax, and that's our 6 million year history as hominids. So we are programmed to rest and then to move as necessary. So to do this optional, this kind of exercise is a little bit unusual for us. And some people take to it really well, other people not at all. And they're not to be blamed for that. I mean, that is something that I think is inborn in a lot of us. In a lot of ways, we have to make it attractive. We have to present it in such a way that it becomes something that draws people in.

Right. So we essentially need to recreate that because that's like our biology. We are meant to move, but we can just literally go to the refrigerator or go to fast food or go wherever. Like, we don't need to do those things, right? So then we just become sedentary, Right?

And here I think it's really pivotal to make a distinction between exercise and movement. And the way I look at it, since I take this big picture view, I say that exercise is really a modern invention. And if you look at the literature, you don't see references to exercise anytime before the advent of the Industrial Revolution. This is something that came out of England after the Industrial Revolution. People started to exercise, and it's a very recent invention, whereas movement, ancient. And if we think about movement, it puts us in contact and in partnership with all the other organisms on earth. So what I tell people, I say exercise is optional, but movement is essential. And I think that our job as trainers is to get people to experience more movement. And if they want to exercise, that's great, but exercise is optional. We need to help them reweave movement into the fabric of their lives.

So, okay, I love this on the movement because for so many of us, we do things in the fitness industry. It's like you need to do interval training, you need to lift weights. There's this idea. And I know a lot of people, when they look at fitness, they get overwhelmed. Like, I don't really want to do that. And they go to the gym, but they don't like it. So how does somebody find what makes them sizzle?

Well, the short answer is to just try a whole bunch of different things and to really shop around. Try everything from dance to yoga to martial arts, the whole range, and find the thing that gives you the most pleasure and that's the one that's going to pull you in. And for me, it was martial arts. It was like, I want to do this every night and I want to do it for as long as I'm alive. I mean, I was that turned on by it. And sometimes you just fall into these things, but we certainly can't force it on people. The other thing that I like to think about is a distinction between classical approaches and romantic approaches. Some people really like the classical approach, where they like numbers and bullet points and spreadsheets and hierarchies and units, and they, like. Triathletes are great for this because they like to write everything down and measure everything, and they thrive under a classical approach. But other people prefer a romantic approach. And these are the people who do yoga or dance or tai chi. And you would never catch these people tracking their activity or measuring their things or logging their activity on spreadsheets, because it's all about the experience and the movement and the enjoyment of it. Some people like classical, some people like romantic. And we need to find a fit.

Where people do best, that is. You came up with that, right? Did you?

Well, actually, no. I've kind of modified that idea. I got it out of a hippie literature book in the 1970s. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. He spends a lot of time exploring this distinction between classical and romantic. And I think it's really a powerful distinction.

Yeah, totally. Because I think a lot of people are. If they're romantic, then they're trying to be classical. And they think, you know, I think because we're so into measuring and things, you know, and if you're not into it, like, I count my steps, I wear a little band, and it's, like, fun. But I don't like it near as much as my husband. Like, he loves. He's, like, all about the measuring. Like, did you get your 10,000? I'm like, I'm good. Like, it's not that big of a deal to me.

Right, right. And everybody's different, and everybody has different phases in their life. I went through a time where I wanted to measure everything. I wanted to know everything about what was going on in my body, and every mile that I did, however I was doing it. And now I'm much more romantic. And now I just want to. I want to dance, I want to move. I want to experience the pleasure. So it's different.

I love that. I love that idea. Okay, so also, I want to address the appearance and how we get so focused on what we look like that we choose exercise. Like, oh, that exercise is going to give me abs. Or that exercise. You know, like, we just. It seems like in our culture, we're so driven by what we look like, and if it's going to help Us lose weight. And I feel like that just stresses us out. Do you think?

Big time. It warps. It distorts the entire enterprise. And what I ask people to do, I invite them to look again at human evolution. And you don't have to go back that far in human evolution to get to a place where there were no mirrors, there were no cameras, there was no way to look at yourself. And can you imagine a feeling of freedom and liberation if you didn't have to know what you looked like? In fact, you would see the other faces and the bodies of the people in your tribe. You would know their faces very well, but you wouldn't know. You would go through your whole life not knowing what you looked like and presumably not caring that much about it either. I mean, there would not be that mild. But focus on that. So it's something that we really need to get away from. And I'm a critic of the fitness industry on this. I think the glossy magazines really do a disservice to a lot of people. And the focus should be on tribe and public health and not on the individual so much.

Yeah. It's very interesting, too, that we didn't look at ourselves. Now we're, like, so obsessed with looking at ourselves. I mean, I think men and women, but especially women.

Yes. Yeah. It's a huge distraction.

I love that. I love that. I just read a book recently about a woman who literally went a year without looking at a mirror. Like, she covered up the mirrors and she just wanted to kind of have that experience because she was so obsessed with her body image. And it's, like, hard for us to even imagine. Right. Only seeing the faces of our community and the people that love us like they are reflecting back their love and beauty, and we just. Our appearance is not that important.

Right, exactly. The other part of the evolutionary approach that I really am interested in is this idea of social identity and this African philosophy called Ubuntu. Ubuntu basically means that I identify most strongly with the tribe and not as an individual. So the thing you hear often in Africa is people say we are people through other people. And I am who I am because of who we are. And the emphasis on the individual just is not there. And people would not be interested in glorifying themselves in that type of environment because you need the tribe to stay alive, and the tribe is what keeps you happy.

Wow, that's beautiful. It's so different than definitely America kind of Western culture.

Right, right, exactly. And in fact, I think that this idea of Ubuntu is common in many indigenous cultures. And when you start looking at it that way, Western culture starts to look very different and very aberrant too. We're the exception.

So how would we. If we want to kind of start moving towards this, and a lot of people kind of have this idea anyways. But if you wanted to have practices, how would you kind of embody this philosophy, if you will, a little bit more?

Well, that's tricky. I think we need to sort of branch out from existing programs and existing structures. I think we can. Yoga and martial arts are great places to begin, where we can make them more social and more playful and really emphasize the community aspect of it rather than the body, sculpting, body, beautiful aspect of it. So those are good places to start. I'd like to see it more in the schools as well and to turn down the level of competition and work more towards a Ubuntu type philosophy. So it can be done. But we need to be trained differently too. As trainers, we need to take that into account. And, you know, we're definitely part of the problem because we put so much emphasis on the individual. So we need to be different too.

Yeah. On the competitive, I mean, I grew up competitive sports. I definitely am very competitive, but it doesn't always. I mean, it's like fun, but it also doesn't. It gets to a point where it's. It feels not good, you know?

Right. And competition. I have this conversation with a lot of people and I finally came to the conclusion that competition is like a lot of the substances that we take into our bodies, the dose makes the poison. Right. It's in small amounts. It can be a wonderful, great thing that's beneficial for our health and it makes us feel better as individuals and more empowered. But too much competition is definitely bad for everybody, so.

And my husband said he'll. He'll be able to tell me where the root of competition or maybe, you know, but like, that it actually means to strive with, not to like competition, like whatever the root is. I don't know, but it's like that feeling of like you strive with another human being versus like you're trying to beat another human being down.

I've heard this. Yeah. And I'm sure there's different styles of competition, different feel, feeling states of competition too. So. Yeah, it depends how it's coached.

Yeah. Interesting. Okay, so I want to talk about pleasure and pleasure and fitness. Exercise, movement usually do not go together. So how can we, you know, tune into our bodies and experience more Pleasure with our movement. And what does pleasure mean to you in the realm of fitness? That's a lot of questions in one, right?

Well, first of all, I think it's important, and it's of course something that we bypass because we feel it's so important to strive and sweat. And those are great things. I'm a big believer in discipline and work. I think we have to do that and we have to keep the pleasure element alive while we're doing that. So discipline and work, just like competition or the dose makes the poison, you can go too far with that. What I keep coming back to is the neuroscience on this, because what neuroscience tells us, we know how the nervous system learns and how synaptic membranes adapt to you. So we know that repetition is vital to learning. You have to do repetition. The key is to do high quality repetitions. And high quality repetitions mean we need to make them precise and we need to have them come at certain intervals. And that's all the whole science of periodizing our repetitions, our sets and our reps. But the other quality we look for in precision or high quality repetition is attention and focus. Attentional density. That's the buzzword that these people are using now. Attentional density. So you putting as much of your concentration and your focus onto the thing as possible. Now that can come through work or can come through play and pleasure as well. As long as you are really curious about what you're trying to do, then you're going to get the results. So that can come from different aspects of personality, different spirits that come to it. You might say, I'm a hard worker, I'm really dedicated. I really want to work this thing until I get it. That would be fun. That would be a form of pleasure for you. Or you could just say, hey, I just love doing this thing. And I'm really curious if I can master this sequence or this movement or this game, whatever it is. So work works. Pleasure works too.

So tell me about the full engagement. Like you were just saying, we need to be fully engaged in it. Tell us a little bit more about that and what that means and how that looks in regards to fitness.

Well, a good way to think of this, the modern predicament that we find ourselves in with so many distractions that people talk about multitasking, which is not that accurate. What the brain actually does is switch tasks really fast. So we don't really multitask. We switch tasks and when we try and do more than one thing at once, the brain attends over here and then Attends over here, and it goes back and forth. So if you go to a typical gym where they have TVs on the walls and posters and music and lots of noise and distractions, you've got your movements, but then you've got all these other stimuli, and so your brain is moving around quite a bit, and that it's stressful, it's distracting, and it saps our energy, too. So that weakens. It dilutes our attention, it dilutes our ability to concentrate. Whereas if you go to a really nice yoga studio or really nice martial arts studio, where there's nothing on the walls, or maybe some nice piece of art on the walls, a nice white, clean floor, and it's just you and gravity and momentum and other people. That's simple. And so now you can bring all of your resources, all of your cognitive resources, all of your spiritual resources to bear on doing one thing, and that's where you get the results. This is why I argue so much for simplicity. It's like we have to design our training environments and make them clean, make them simple, and get rid of all the glitter, all the flash, everything else, just go to necessities.

Because that's stressing out our nervous system, essentially.

Yeah. It's redundant, too, because we go out in the world, we leave the gym, we go out in the world, and now we're assaulted even more by all this competing stimuli. So the gym should be a refuge from that. A gym should be a place where we can bring all of our powers to bear on doing one thing, rather than just recreating what's out there in the world. And then it's just more stress.

Right. I love that because it's almost like a form of retreat meditation. Silence, like the yin, the yang, having that dynamic.

Right, right. It is a retreat, in a sense, because we are assaulted just about everywhere else we go.

Yeah. Well, I think that's so beautiful because for so many of us, we just think we need to exercise. And you have an idea of what it is. I've never even thought about this, that you go into the gym and it's all the stimulus that you have in your work that you're not actually rejuvenating and you're not getting the most that you could be from your movement and your exercise.

Right. And the classic example is you have somebody on the StairMaster or on the treadmill who has the iPhone, the ipod on, and they're reading a magazine and there's all this going on. And we've taken to calling this Schizophrenia, because you have this stimulus, this auditory stimulus, and then this physical movement that are not congruent with each other, and they're not congruent with the environment either. So there's this huge disconnect, sensory disconnect. And you got to ask, what are you training for? What are you trying to get out of that? It's largely a waste of time, as far as I can see.

Interesting. So if you. Let's say you're. You know, you're. Because sometimes I will go walking and I'll listen to some audio. Right. Or I go running and I listen to music, and I really like it, and I do the yoga and do everything else. But you're saying we should just kind of tune into our body and our sensory awareness, and we're going to get more benefit for that than actually listening to the music or listening to something else.

Well, it depends what you want to get out of it. It depends what your ultimate goals are. But if your ultimate goals is physicality and physical training, then you ditch the audio, I think, and try and bring as much of your attention to bear on the physical experience. That's it. I mean, there's nothing wrong with listening to music while you exercise, but it's just a different thing.

Yeah. So just being clear about not just doing it, being mindful about it. Of, like, what's your intention?

Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. And if you're just moving for pleasure and you like the music, that's great. But if you're training to be an Olympic athlete, you better get all your resources focused on the movement and what you're doing.

Interesting. I'm curious, because I have this. And this is a constant practice, and I know you talk about meditation and mindfulness and attention, and this has come up a lot in the. This conference of, like, being in the moment. Right. Of, like, you need to be fully in the moment. But it seems like we are. So maybe this goes back to the brain, but we get so distracted, and we don't really want to be in the moment. When we're eating, we're thinking about something else, or we're reading or we're exercising, we're thinking about something else. Like, how do we. You have some practices of how we can have be in the moment, be really, really pleasurable and to, like, train ourselves to come back to the present.

Well, the training. The classic training, of course, is seated meditation, focusing on the breathing and simply being observant. When your attention starts to wander and when you realize that your attention has wandered, to gently bring it back onto the breath. That's the practice. So it's the art of return, if you will. And the key point here is that to turn your attention back toward yourself, you have to be kind to yourself. You have to be compassionate to yourself. Because if you try and fight it in any way, you're just going to generate more noise and more confusion and more new ideas that are going to spin off and the noise will just perpetuate. So you need to be sort of what I call a mind whisperer. You have to bring it back gently and over and over and over again. And there's great pleasure there. There's immense pleasure there. When you. The metaphor you always hear is that it's a glass of water with dirt in it. And you stir it up. You stir it up and then you just let it sit, let it sit. And then the dirt starts to settle to the bottom. And when you get that feeling, it's immensely pleasurable. I think the problem is, in the modern world, we're just totally addicted to the activity of the prefrontal cortex, which is an amazing part of the brain because it's what allows us to go into the past, to go into the future. And it's an extremely powerful tool. So we get in the habit of using it, and then we use it even when we don't need to use it. So we're always making this time travel forward and back, scanning, looking, trying, planning, all this executive function, which is exhausting, ultimately. And when you meditate, also when you sleep, the prefrontal cortex gets a rest that's very powerful.

Interesting. I love that, because it's like you have different paces. There's different paces for everything. And we're trying to get go at one pace all the time. And this is like, as you were just saying that I'm like, oh, there's different gears that we should be tuning into. I feel it. I always. I used to feel bad about it that I would get, like, stressed because people seem like people were doing so many things and they could multitask and they were doing this. And I'm like, I just need a break. Like, I felt like I needed a nap or whatever, and I thought that I was, like, weak for needing those. But as you're saying, it's like, you're not weak. That brain part of your brain just needs to relax.

Yes, yes. And there's virtue in doing less. Doing less means you're going to wind up performing at a higher level. So it feels paradoxical, and I guess it is. But I Think when we scale back our ambition and scale back our team. In fact, I even came up with a reverse to do list. Here's all the things that I don't have to do in my life. It's quite a long list and it's a really great place to start because, wow. I don't have to win a Nobel Prize. I don't have to go to the Olympic Games, you know, I don't have to start a new company. There's a million things.

Yeah, I think that's. I love that. What do you call a reversal?

Reverse to do list.

That's are great because we get. I mean, our to do lists are just so much. And we. I can feel it. I know in my body. I've done so much body awareness, but I know, like, when I start feeling it, everything's like. And I'm like, okay, just relax. It's fine if you don't get that done. But there's like, such an urge for us to, like, get our to do's done and then to be more and to have more and, like, do it all today.

Right. And we are in a culture where this. One of the prevailing memes is just do it. And we need a new meme. I mean, we need a new phrase. Just let it be. Just don't do it. Yeah, there's virtue there too, definitely.

I love what you bring too, like, the simplicity to it, you know, because I think there's so much around. Just, you know, just do it. Like, do everything. Like, okay, just be simple. Like, go back like you said earlier, the animal. Like, just go back. Like, what did we do back then? We ate. You know, it was very simple. And that's what. Every time that I go back to that, I feel happier.

Right, right. And this is something I observed when I went to Tanzania. I went to Gambi, which is the area that Jane Goodall did her work with the chimpanzees. And I was actually able to go out in the forest and spend a couple of days with the chimpanzees in the wild. And they spend a lot of time just sitting, just looking at the sky, looking at the trees. And of course, their other activities are play, and they hunt and they mate and they do work chimps do. But a lot of that time is just kind of being it. There's plenty of food in Gombe, so they don't have to hunt that much, they don't have to eat that much, and they just sit. So they're kind of an inspiration. And plus, they have no clipboards, no treadmills, no heart rate monitors, no lab counters, none of that stuff, right? Fantastically healthy and fantastically fit.

Interesting, I like that. So you just said they play. I know you wrote a book on play and you're all about play. So can you tell us, what do you mean? When they play, what does it mean for human species to play?

Right. Well, play is what I call our original learning. That's how we learn as infants and we're wired to play. All mammals play, all primates play. Play is probably tens of millions of years old. It has a real survival value because it's the impulse that helps us learn the world. And it's already there. So I don't think we have to reinvent the wheel. I think if we can tap into that existing impulse, then we're going to do fine. Of course, humans are so interesting because we can play with just about anything, not just our bodies and people and gravity and momentum, but we can play with words and language and stories and mythology and the whole thing. So we are the greatest players that ever live. But in terms of health and fitness, it gets down, I think, to locomotor play, which means playing with the ways that we walk and skip and hop and jump. And here we just go to the playground and watch the way little children play. I mean, all that is functional exercise training. We just, you know, we adults come along, we say, well, we're doing, we're going to climb it now. But no, the kids have been doing it. You do all your, all your hopping, skipping, jumping, leaping, all that stuff. It's right there. We just need to recreate it. And it's locomotive play, social play, obviously object play, so kids playing with every object around them. But now we bring in medicine balls and wobble boards. And now we can have object play too. So you can combine all of those. The locomotive play, the social play, the object play. And now you've got all these games that you can come up with. And this, I think, is the main place that trainers ought to be working. Let's take play and expand it instead of trying to reinvent a work based program. So it's really exciting and the benefits are huge. I wrote a little piece called Lessons from the Dog Park. Everybody's been to the dog park and you've watched the animals play. And there's three lessons I take away from that. One is the play bow. You'll see, the dogs will do the play bow, which is really interesting animal behavior because what it means is that it basically Signals. Everything after this is pretend. So I'm going to bite you on that neck, I'm going to bite you on the ears, I'm going to chase you around, I'm going to try and bite your tail, all that stuff. It's pretend. And that's an agreement. So these animals do a play bow. Now, humans, it's more subtle. We get together, maybe we shake hands in a playful way, or we smile, we have eye contact in a playful way, or we tell a joke. These are all ways to say everything after this is pretend. That's a play bow. We also have role reversals you see at the dog park all the time. So it's like, you chase me now I'll chase you. You chase me, I'll chase you. And little kids, you remember this when you're 5 years old, you chase me, and then I'll chase you. That role reversal is really interesting because it's this willingness to be dominant and then this willingness to be submissive to play either role. This role flexibility, that kind of disappears when we become adults. So now we're adults and we say, well, I have a role, I have an identity, and I'm supposed to be dominant over you, or I'm submissive to you. And we rarely allow flexibility into those roles. But that's a lesson from the dog park that we could take to heart. Yeah, let's be a little more flexible. And a closely related one is called self handicapping. And you've always seen where there's some big, huge dog playing with a little tiny dog, right? And they play, they figure it out, they work it out. And what's happening here is that the great big dog self handicaps. He withholds some of his power because he's more interested in the play. If it was a competition, of course, it would be no contest. But the big dog says, I really want to play, so I'm gonna. I'm gonna really withhold my power so that we can play. And that's another message for us as adult humans. It's like, wow, you really want to play. You might have to withhold some of your power. So those are lessons from the dog park.

I learned that. So if you're just saying it too, it's very interesting. As you were, you know, sharing all those experiences, it seems like it's very, like you said, flexible and spontaneous, which I feel like so many of us are missing that element in our. In our fitness and exercise regime. Right? Like, it's like, okay, I'm gonna do this. This and this. But there's no. Usually there's not a space for like, I'm just gonna see what happens. I'm going to move my body and see if I want to skip. I can't tell you that. The last time that I was like, oh, I'm just going to play and see if I skip and jump and dance, that'd be a pretty awesome workout. But I don't do that.

It's great. And it's also very challenging for a lot of people because if you don't feel confident in your body and if you don't have some physical experience to draw on, or maybe you've been sedentary for years or whatever it is, and then you come into this arena where people are moving in spontaneous ways. That can be a real challenge. So for us as trainers, that's, I think, a challenge to us is how do we integrate people who maybe have been sedentary for a long time, don't feel confident in their ability to move, and then to ask them to play at a high level, that may be too big a gap for people to transcend. So maybe they need some discipline training so that they feel confident. And. And then we transition them into more athletic kinds of play.

That's great in just being comfortable, because I know that that's a big issue. For people that have been sedentary, when they go to the gym or they go somewhere, they feel insecure. They're like, you know, I haven't done this, I haven't exercised or done anything in 10, 15 years. And they're just getting into it and they're not at everybody else's level and they can be intimidated. So I think that's a great point to bring up, really, people just being gentle with themselves, as you were saying, coming back into it.

Right. The other great phrase I sometimes use with trainers is safe emergency. So you've got a group of people and your goal, I think, is to create a safe emergency. In other words, we're looking to stress people out a little bit. Stress is important for the learning process, but we want it to be safe. And so there we build in certain procedures, certain safeguards, certain experiences that people feel taken care of and they feel like they can handle maybe simplistic movements or some things that are really vigorous. We take care of their safety and then the emergency will be play. And that works out great. But it's always fine tuning.

Yeah. Okay, so you just said stress. I'm curious about this because there's the modern day stress, but then there's also, like, how do we know the balance of stress within our body? Like, when is too much, when do we need a little bit more? And when is stress good for us? When is it not good for us? Can you talk a little bit about that?

Right. Well, the biomedical approach would be to let's take salivary cortisol tests and then we'll run them down to the lab and we'll see what your cortisol level is. Or we'll take. They can do it with hair now, and they can look at your stress hormone levels in your hair and say that over the last few months your cortisol levels have done whatever they've done, which I think to some extent that's going to be the future, and we're going to see it in more and more settings. But if we're not doing that, then we have to rely on our own state, our own feelings, our own feelings of pleasure and pain. And it always goes back to this U shaped curve. So if you are moderately stressed, you're in a sweet spot because you've got a little bit of cortisol flowing in your bloodstream, your memory, your cognition is working at a great level and your performance is good. You're in this zone called eustress. Eustress, that's a great place to be if you can figure out a way to hang out there. It feels good, it feels playful. You're in what they call flow when you're in that sweet spot. But there's always a tipping point. And when you go over the falls at the tipping point, then you start, start to get into actual distress. And now your workouts, your work, your concentration, a lot of it's wasted because you're burning up the furniture to heat the house. Basically, you're duplicating your efforts and you're not doing well. And now you're starting to expose yourself to injury and illness and cognitive decline and memory problems and everything else that goes with it. So the whole key is identifying that tipping point. When you go over the falls, one of the greatest ways to do that is when you start to feel a loss of pleasure. They call this anhedonia, which is the word for psychological state where you just don't take pleasure in things the way you used to. So you used to love going to the gym, or you used to love going out to eat with your friends. You used to love going to the movies. Now when somebody brings it up, that's the point where you reach an anhedonia. And that means you're going over that tipping point into distress. There's other ways to identify it too.

Right. So then let's say you're in that because I think that's probably common for people to kind of get in that state. What are ways that they can kind of reinvigorate and get back to their pleasure?

Right. Well, all the traditional ones you hear in the stress literature about getting a massage, doing the stress relief practices, all that stuff is good. Exercise is a conundrum there because exercise can be a stressor. So you might actually have to cut back on your exercise. And that's a real double edged thing because exercise is beneficial, exercise is a stressor. You have to make a judgment call. What are you going to do? You might change the nature of your exercise. The other parts of the stress equation have to do with control and predictability. If you can find a way to have more control and predictability in your life, social support, all of these things are going to go a long way to making you feel better. It's such an art, it's such a craft and it's so many judgment calls stacked up on top of one another.

Definitely. And it's. And it's really trusting, like getting to know our own body composition and our own psychology and just, you know thyself.

Right, Exactly. And it also comes back to story. The story you are telling about what you're doing and how you interpret events. This activity that I'm doing now, what is it doing for me and am I doing to just abuse myself because I have to train really hard to get some result? Well, that's one story. Or am I doing this thing for pleasure and fun because I like being good to myself? That's a different story entirely. Excuse me, I have an insult.

I was very interested in this story topic. I like this because I think that's a huge component that you bring up. Like what is the story that we're bringing to our exercise, to our fitness? Right. Because do you find that a lot of people are bringing the story of I ate too much, I want to lose weight and it's like this hate and fear and frustration and like I've got to do it in order to be skinny or whatever? Like there isn't usually a pleasure story.

I need to punish myself and that my body will respond to this punishment and to a certain extent it does. It will super compensate to adversity. But the spiritual element is huge and the story is important. And this is where I take issue with the whole boot camp approach because I Think a lot of boot camps are set up on this military model where it's all about character building and it's all about imposing a lot of adversity on people. And that can have its benefits, but it can sure backfire. It's not for everybody.

Yes. Do you think because weight loss is a big topic for so many people, they want to lose weight and there's the diet and all of that, but just in the realm of the fitness. So you think that people don't have to do an intense butt kicking workout to actually be at their ideal weight?

That's a good question and I don't have the answer. I mean, we've done so much research into weight loss over the last 20 years and it's such a conundrum. I think what has to happen is we have to turn on certain sets of genes. There has to be an epigenetic change in the body. And one way to do that is through hard training. And that's probably not the only way to do it. Certain diet and stress are going to have to do with that as well. But as far as having one recipe or one formula that's going to work for everybody, I don't think so. If that was the case, Big pharma would have figured this out a long time ago. And after billions and billions of dollars, they haven't. I think we have to take a multidisciplinary approach trying to turn on these genes through diet, through exercise, through stress reduction, through positive social experience and even story. I think story probably turns on genes and turns off genes in our body. Totally.

Right. I mean, it's amazing that actually what we're thinking changes our chemistry. I find that. I mean, it makes sense, but we don't really think about it that much. Like we literally are changing our DNA by how we're thinking about ourselves and our life.

Right. The book to look at on that one, this guy, Herbert Benson, who wrote the Relaxation Response back in the late 70s, I believe, and then his second book called the Relaxation Revolution, where they actually did blood draws before and after people did a series of mindfulness meditations. It was like a six week course or something. And this is what he found was epigenetic changes. So whole clusters of genes turned on and turned off in response to this metaphor. Huge finding, amazing finding.

I love epigenetics. That we can literally change the environment and change our genes. That is amazing.

That's the future. And in fact it's such a powerful idea that we would spend billions and billions of dollars to do what we can do with exercise and meditation. But it's free. It's totally free. All we have to do is take the time and do it.

Yeah. Awesome. So are you like on the. I like this idea and I've read a little bit on it. Just having different ways of going about fitness, but that you going back to working with tribes and people like that, how they train, like they only run every once in a while. But there is like that burst of training, if you will, like in our biology. Am I making sense?

Yes. Well, let's talk about the paleo orientation, because Paleo is a hot topic in the world of health right now. And I think a lot of people are looking for a single answer are coming out of the Paleo. Paleo is a period of 2 million years during which time there was this huge diversity of tribes living in this huge diversity of habitats. So you might have one tribe living in a very arid environment, another in a very tropical or very forested environment. And people develop different adaptations, different strategies, different physical behaviors to deal with that. So some were probably, in a sense, sedentary, probably sit and wait for the animals to come to you. Other times you go out to the animals. Some environments require a lot of physical movement, some not so much. So the paleo orientation, the paleo prescription, if you will, is to try and integrate with your environment, whatever it is. So there is consensus among these anthropologists who say that most native tribal indigenous groups probably walked five to ten miles every day. And that sounds like a good touchstone. Obviously there must be some running, especially younger tribes, people who just love to run, obviously. But all of this, all this locomotor cross terrain travel was probably done in groups because it's a dangerous place and there's carnivores everywhere. So you don't go out by yourself, you go out with tribe and you integrate to the environment. So if the footing is good, you run fast. If the footing is not so good, you walk or you go very slow. And it all depends on habitat.

How does nature play into this too? Because as you're talking about it, we're outside, we're breathing fresh air and we're on uneven terrain. And now we're usually in a gym or everything's all organized and there's no sun. So how does nature impact kind of our health and our well being and our fitness?

Right. Well, the most conspicuous example is the light, of course. The other one is texture and sensation, especially through the skin. Remember, we spent most of our history barefoot, so that was a huge amount of sensation coming into our bodies that you can think of the foot as a sensory organ, just like our hands are. So we've taken away so much of that tactile experience, and I think much to our detriment. That's a lot of information no longer coming into our bodies, and that's got to affect how we feel. The other thing that's really changing, it's really a hot topic right now is the microbiome. So all of the bacteria that lives in us and on us is drastically altered in a modern environment. So we clean all our surfaces, Everything we touch is plastic and hygienic now, whereas before we were always grubbing in the dirt and digging up roots, and we were dirty all the time. And that was very therapeutic for us. I mean, we were living with the very bacteria in the habitat that we were born. So we were fully embedded in that habitat. And that's no longer the case. I mean, we're living, no matter where you live now, it's an alien environment in terms of the microbial population. So that we're going to get it figured out, but it's going to take a long time because it's a huge diversity of organisms that live in us and on us.

So we should be outside as much as possible, Is that what you're saying?

Digging in the dirt and having contact, getting our shoes off, getting our skin in contact with rocks and sticks and trees and grass and all of that? Yeah, that's. That's a good place to start.

Yeah. Because I think, as you were saying, there's the sensory, and we learn about our environment and we adapt and there's like, there's got to be some sort of communication that's happening between plants and ground and our bodies, that we may not be conscious of it. Right. But there's some sort of connection happening.

Right. And some of this is coming out of the research now, where they're finding out that some of these bacteria that live in us actually contribute to the production of neurotransmitters and hormones. So some of the serotonin that flows into your brain through your body is created by bacteria living in your gut. So you change that bacteria, you change the serotonin levels, and now you're depressed, and now you need to take Zoloft because your microbial ecosystem is all messed up. So, yeah, getting outside, getting in the dirt.

And I also read somewhere recently that something with the dirt that literally, like you were saying, the microbes, like, release serotonin, like, it's really good Gardeners and people that are, like, in the dirt literally releases those neurotransmitters.

Right, right. And they're actually talking now about transplants from one individual to another, going into the gut, pulling out some bacteria, putting that bacteria, seed it into another individual. And it's been shown in rats to have some profound weight loss effects and other things. So you're going to hear a lot more about this in the future.

Very cool. This is awesome. All of this stuff, as you know, it's just coming back to our primal nature. Right. I mean, this is like, we're wired for this. Like, the movement, like, all of it, it just makes sense.

Right, Right. Yeah. It's easy to go too far in the other direction. We, I think, a lot of times tend to romanticize the Paleo and say, well, that was a golden age. And I see a lot of this, people are just freaked out about the modern world and how the number of ways the modern world is alien to us and giving us stress. Wouldn't it be nice if we could just go back to the Paleo? And that would be an interesting time travel because, yes, there definitely would be some health benefits, but your lifespan would be short and it would be tough. I mean, sleeping outdoors on the ground is not always fun, and I like things like hot showers and soft beds.

I think that's a great point because I know that a lot of times we can get into the tribal and we're like, this is where what they did. And I'm a new mom, so I have, like a baby, and it's like, this is what they did back then and all this. And you're like, okay, great, back then. I'm a modern woman. I live in the United States. There's things that I like about the modern. So I want to take the things that I like about that and kind of create my own.

They're the best of both worlds. Yeah. Yeah. That's the way to go.

Very cool. Okay, so I have one more question. I have so many questions, but I want to ask one more question. You said earlier, like, discipline, and how does, like, discipline and willpower and all of this come into it? I know people usually don't think this is pleasurable, but so I'll give an example. For me, I move every day, right. I exercise, but I notice that if I like to get my heart rate up and do things like that, and sometimes I get, like, on a roll and I like it, and then all of a sudden I start feeling falling off and it's like, I Have to like get back on the horse again. And I know this is a common thing in the fitness. You know, when people start a fitness routine, like they're, they're in it, they're in it, they're in it and then they're off and then they're not doing it for a couple days or a month or a couple years. Like, how does this all, how do we create like habits and disciplines to actually do what we want to do?

Well, I think a good way to think of what you've just described is to think in terms of rhythm and think in terms of seasons. Going back to the Paleo, there would have definitely been seasonal variations in our activity levels. That would be normal. Right. And so now here we are in the modern world and you have a period of time, say six months, where you're just really hitting it and you're loving it, it's all great. And then you fall off that now's the time to have some compassion for yourself because that's probably normal. That's probably a normal variation. And just like, yeah, you know, my body needs some time off the heel and if I don't go to the gym for a few weeks, it's not going to kill me. And that's all fine. I mean, having this time off is really valuable. The off sleep is really important. And we've gotten away from this in this chronic training where the off season is starting to disappear. If you go back to the era of Jim Thorpe and the athletes of the mid 20th century, there was a distinct off season when people trained really hard in training camp, trained through the season and then when the championship was over, then you have your definite offseason. But now people train you around and it produces some great performances. But it puts us at the razor's edge of going too far. So I say give yourself a break. As long as you've got some sense of rhythm in your life. These are the big rhythms, the big cycles, the seasonal multi year cycles.

Yeah, I love that.

It's a great thing.

That's such great advice for me personally. But then I know people listening because we do kind of, as we were saying earlier, we think there's like a one track training mode and there is the seasons and you know, like, and I love that you said like it's normal, like you're on and then you're off. Like there's nothing wrong with being off.

And resting and there are other things in life besides exercise. And it's. If you develop an interest in something else and you want to pursue that for a while. That's great. And your body will remind. Trust your body. Your body will remind yourself. One day you're going to wake up and you go, man, I just feel terrible. I don't feel good. But I know what to do about it. I know what to do because I have that experience. I can go out and start moving again and I'm going to feel great again.

And then, like you were saying earlier, letting go of the story. Right. Because then we can like, oh, I know what to do. Why did I get off track? Drop the story and just go exercise.

Right? Yeah. I think there's a Nike T shirt out there, something to affect now it's a no off season, and I think it's a really bad message. Yeah, it's not right. You see kids wearing it and this is what we do in youth sports now. They just go from one season to the next to the next, and they're training all the time. And that's not right.

It's just crazy. Yeah. I mean, I've been an athlete for all my life and I definitely. I started getting injured when I played college volleyball and it was like you were always on and always training, and it became like, as you were talking about, like it wasn't fun anymore. I think when we're like training so hard and pushing ourselves so hard, it just like it loses as, you know, the play and the fun and the pleasure.

Yep.

Fantastic. Okay, well, this is such a great conversation, but I would love you to share where people can learn more about you, your website, buy your books, all of that stuff.

Right? Well, that's easy. You just go to exuberantanimal.com and that's the website. It has the books there. And if I'm doing any trainings coming up, they'll be listed there. The blog. I think I'm really proud of the blog. There's a lot of good writing there and, you know, it's all available. I'm also, if people want to host a training, that's a good way to go. If you have a facility and a group of people, you can invite me out. That would be great. I'd be happy to do a training for you and I'll tell you all about it. So exuberant.

Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for sharing your exuberance and awesomeness.

Well, thank you so much. It was fun.

We hope you enjoyed this episode of Mama Goddess. Sending you lots of love and blessings. If you'd like to connect more, go to mamagoddess.com until next time. Keep rocking it and have an awesome day.