My Top 3 FITNESS Books of All Time (+ a Life-Changing Idea From Each!) (#7)

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hey, this is Brian. 500 of my favorite books. 600 of my favorite philosopher's notes on that desk. Continuing our optimized philosopher's notes top three series. Today we're going to talk about my top three fitness books of all time. We started with my top three books of all time, the Tools, Deep Work and Happy Together. Then we did Habits, Ancient Wisdom, Modern Science, Nutrition, Weight Loss. Now we're ready for fitness. All right, let's get to work. Spartan Up. That's my number one favorite fitness book of all time. Just Joe decenna has become one of my dear friends soul brother. We have notes on three of his books. We're going to talk about that. Then we're going to talk about the Joy of movement, the science of exercise. You know that you release hope molecules when you train. It's true. We're going to talk about Kelly McGonigal's great book. Then we're going to talk about the Maffetone Method, a book you may not have heard of. I was introduced to Maffetone from Christopher McDougall in Born to Run and Natural Born Heroes. He talks about Phil Maffetone, fascinating guy, using fat for fuel training in your aerobic zone. And then we've actually today got a plus one, another book you've probably never heard of, Sitting Kills, Moving Hills by Joan Vernikos. Who is she was the woman at NASA in the health department, their health center there responsible for bringing the astronauts home healthy ly healthily. Is that a word? And she studied the effects of being in outer space on astronauts and their health. It's astonishing. And then she compares that to being sedentary these days. So this changed my life. So did Maffetone Method, so did Spartan up, and so did Joy of Movement. As always, we have these books and we have The Philosopher's Note. 6 page PDF, 20 minute MP3. You can get it on the site Optimize Me. You can get the apps iOS and Android and we've got that free two week trial going on. Check it out at Optimize Me, straight up the website Optimize Me. You can get the free two week trial and then you can also follow us on the top three series at top three Optimize Me. Top three, get three free notes and going to Optimize Me, you can do the two free week trial. We've also got the lifetime offer, 250 bucks for access to all 600 of the philosopher's notes. And 50 master classes and plus ones, et cetera. Then of course we have Coach. If you want to go all in, master yourself, serve heroically, empower others through the same, you may want to join 2000 plus optimizers from 70 countries around the world. Optimize me, Coach. And you know what's funny? It's a 300 day program inspired by the Spartan Warriors. And to graduate our program, you need to do a Spartan race. We have our Optimize team. Optimize was the second largest team in Spartan's history. Last year when we had our first graduation, over 500 of us crushed it together. The next time we can do it, we're going to have Deo Valente, God willing, over a thousand and set the all time record. All right, Spartan up. A take no prisoner's guide to overcoming obstacles and achieving peak performance in life. So yeah, where to begin? I mean this book just changed my life because it really just flipped the switch for me to become an athlete. There's so much goodness in the book. And then we capture in the note, impossible versus really hard is a really good one. Have you ever heard of Goren Kropp? In October 1995, Descenta tells us he left Stockholm, Sweden on a bicycle and rode it to the base of Mount Everest. Then he climbed Everest, reached the summit with no oxygen mask and no help from Sherpas. Then he came down the mountain and pedaled back to Sweden. Now you may say that's impossible or you're crazy, but it turns out it's not impossible. It's hard, really hard, but doable under the right circumstances. So a lot of things we think are impossible aren't impossible. They're just really hard. And it's funny because before I did a Spartan race, I actually had convinced myself that I can't do it. I almost didn't do my first three Spartan races. The sprint and then the beast. I think I did next and then the super. And I literally almost didn't get to the starting line. And the first obstacle that I tell our coaches in our community is the first getting to the starting line. The first obstacle is the story you have in your head about why you can't do a Spartan race or anything else you feel called to do. And that's why the tagline for Spartan race is you'll know at the finish line. What will you know? It'll be different for everyone, but you'll know how many other things you gave up on, how many other things you didn't even get to the starting Line on that you could have done had you gone for it. So that's why I'm all into Spartan races. It's also the perfect physical metaphor for embodying hope. Longer chat we have in different contexts, I'll leave it at that. But when you pay to face obstacles, it's such the perfect metaphor for our lives. Of course we're gonna face obstacles. Whether it's Covid or job loss or illness or whatever life is about obstacles. We wanna get good at facing them. That's why our mantra for our coach program is obstacles make me stronger. Ohms O M s. Obstacles make me stronger. Spartan up Life changing book. If you haven't done a spartan race yet, get on that. There's a ton of other great ideas here. I also got into burpees. Some people ask me how I train, etc. I do burpees. I do a hundred burpees a day. I actually do 10 sets of 11. So I do 110. You do 40,000 burpees a year. Get in decent shape. Joe also tells us approach life if he's doing a long run. Joe is like a, you know, hall of fame endurance athlete. Just has done some crazy stuff. But he says you don't stress yourself out about the whole race. Just get to the next telephone pole, get to the next telephone pole, get to the next telephone pole. That's Spartan up. Then we have the Joy of movement. Now Kelly McGonagall is one of my favorite positive psychologists. Again, we've got dozens of notes on positive psychology books. See if I can find another one of hers. Where's no stress? It's in there somewhere. No stress. Where are you? No sweat. I don't know where it is, but she's got no. I'm sorry. The Upside of Stress. Not no stress. The upside of Stress. So wait, I got a whole nother stack of of positive psychology, but there it is. The Upside of Stress is another Kelly McGonagall book. We've got a ton of other ones. I don't know where her willpower. Oops. Willpower Instinct is, but that's an extraordinary book as well. This is the science of Movement. The Joy of Movement. How Exercise Helps us Find Happiness, Hope, Connection and Courage. Map of Tones Falling Down. This is my new go to book. If you want to understand the science of exercise and movement, this is the book it used to be Spark. And we've got, you know, this was. There's a lot of books I could have chosen in terms of, you know, the top three and the top ten I'm really into health and fitness, obviously, nutrition, sleep, et cetera. Because zest, your energy is the number one predictor of your well being. It's the number one virtue. So we've got Joe's other book, Spartan Fit. We've got his third book. Spartan Way Spark is by John rady, a Harvard, Maryland psychiatrist. We've got Natural Born Heroes by McDougall. We've also got Born to Run. We've got Move youe DNA by Katie Bowman. That's awesome. We've got Evolution. We've got no Sweat on the Science of Health Behavior. We've got Don't Just Sit There, another book by Katie Bowman. We've got the big picture. This guy's great. Tony Horton, P90X. The book's pretty cool. Lots of great ideas. And then Phil Maffetone, who we'll talk about in a moment. I got into his stuff and read six of his books in like 10 days or two weeks. Back to the joy of movement. Hope molecules. You know, the runner's high. Well, there's actually a more scientific term for it. It's called hope molecules. There's a really profound neuroscience going on in your brain when you move your body. And Kelly says, look, we were, we were made to move. Nature rewards us with feel good hormones and molecules in our brains when we move our bodies. It's profound. You want to make yourself anxious, tired and hostile. Well, don't move. There's actually a number of steps a day. 5,649. If you get less than 5,649 steps a day, you're prone to anxiety and depression. How many steps do you get a day? The typical American takes 4774 thus far. Today I have taken 10,881. It's one o'. Clock. Let's see if I can show you on my suunto watch. All right, there's my seven day running average. It's a little lower than it actually is because I'm only midway through the day, 16,705. I get 100,000 steps a day. Right. So yesterday, let's see what we got. Yesterday I had 19,000 and change. Day before that, 19,000 515,000. You couldn't pay me to not move and to get steps again. We challenge our coaches to get 10,000 steps a day and or move for 30 minutes a day. How many steps are you getting? Know that simply measuring your steps increases your steps by a mile. Measuring things improves things. And again, they've done research on this and people who usually exercise, who don't exercise, get depressed unbelievably quickly. We talk about this. We also talked about collective effervescence. And I combined these two books because the collective joy of moving together is extraordinary. You should see the video. Maybe we'll clip it on the end of this. We'll clip on the starting line of our Spartan race, follow 500 optimizers. And then a little clip we have of highlight reel from our Spartan race. This is just pure joy in action. She talks about how obstacles make us stronger. I talk about our mantra. Boom. The joy of movement. Then we have the maffetone method again. McDougall introduced me to Maffetone. He was the coach of Mark Allen, the greatest triathlete ironman triathlete in history. Followed Phil Maffetone's wisdom. Basically burn fat for fuel, don't over train. He's got something called a maximum aerobic function number math. You can find that by going 180 minus your age. Right? So I'm 46. So what is that? 134. That's my highest aerobic function number. Then take it down by 10. So basically 125 to 134 is his maffetone range. I found that I was over training. Now I use my suunto watch and I don't go too far over training. I stay in this nice little aerobic zone. And it's astonishing what it's done for my energy. Fascinating stuff. And again I got into Maffetone and actually reached out to him to do some one on one coaching. He's like, ah, I'm not doing that anymore. I said perfect. And I'll just read six of your books. So Maffetone method, the big book of endurance training. Fix your feet. It's fantastic actually on the fact that your feet are incredibly important. Check out the note for ideas there. 159. He predicted that we'd run a sub 2 minute 2 hour marathon, which we did. Recently. He talked about how we do that. The endurance handbook. And I've got another one called the over fat pandemic. So Maffetone's awesome. And the big thing here was don't over train, slow down, burn fat for fuel. Which is what you do when you're in your aerobic zone. When you're anaerobic, you burn sugar for fuel. Longer chat. We'll save for another time. That's maffetone. Then you've got sitting kills, moving heels, top three plus one. This is so cool. Joan is awesome. I don't know. She's in her 80s now and she's such a cool woman. She was there at NASA when we landed a man on the moon. She brought back some wisdom. She talks about the importance of simply standing up. Simply doing that, standing up and then sitting down is actually way more powerful than you may think. So I've got my little Timex watch back here that goes off when I'm not filming every 16 minutes and 40 seconds. Check it out. 16 minutes and 40 seconds. That's a thousand seconds. Boom. I start it when I start my day, and then every single time this goes off, I stand up, I'll bang out 11 burpees or I'll do whatever I'm going to do and then I'll sit back down. That simple action changes your underlying metabolism. It gets, you know, blood and oxygen to your brain. And if you sit all day, every day, you can be active and sedentary, right? You can go to the gym. There's you. You go to the gym in the morning. Awesome. You work out, but then the rest of the day you're sedentary. Researchers call that active and sedentary. Katie Bowman, who didn't quite make the cut here, says exercise exists within the bigger circle of movement. So you want to train yourself to move all day, every day. You want to be a perpetual motion machine is what Joan wants us to become and that we encourage again our coaches and optimizers to become. So there you go. Big three plus one. Maffetone. He's taking a break. He's training his recovery. Very important. Spartan up the joy of movement and then all these other notes on fitness. Really important again, you can get access to all 600 of those. This, 500 books, 600 philosopher's notes. @ Optimize Me. Follow us on the top three series at Optimize Me. Top three, get the lifetime offer that we have right now. 250 bucks lifetime at Optimize Me. Lifetime. And then coaches, if you want to become an optimized coach, come do a Spartan race with us. You'll get this at your graduation. By the way, Optimize equals Optimist equals best equals Udemon equals heroes. Half of the 2000 optimizers from 70 countries around the world joined our program because they just wanted to master their lives. The other half are coaches or aspiring coaches. Learn more. Sign up at Optimize Me. Coach Joe Disena is one of our visiting faculty. We got Joan Vernikos coming. We'll be inviting Kelly, Phil Maffetone, and we've got a ton of other great teachers. Dozens of them. That's all I got. Here's to your fitness. What do we got next? Next up we have. What do we got? Next up we got sleeping. Fantastic. That'll be fun. Then we've got breathing. Then we've got focusing. Then we got celebrating. Then we're gonna turn the page and move on to the next set. Look forward to sharing more with you soon. Have an awesome day. See ya. We hope you enjoyed this episode of Optimize with Brian Johnson. To find out more, go to Optimize Me. Hi, this is Brian. Hope you enjoyed that. Quick note. If you want to go deeper into Optimize, check us out at Optimize Me. The team has set up a free two week trial where you can get instant access to all 600 plus philosopher's notes, all the PDFs, the MP3s, get it on the app, et cetera, and 50 optimal living 101 classes on a range of subjects and of course the thousand plus Optimize plus ones. And then if you want to go all in, check out Optimize. Coach Optimize Me for the free trial for the core wisdom Optimize Me Coach. If you want to go all in and master yourself, serve heroically and empower others to do the same. Have a great day. See you.