Jim's Group CEO, Jim Penman and Joel Kleber on Fitness, Diet, Cold Showers and Slow Walkers? Podcast

Look, I don't see myself as being anything particularly brilliant. I make a lot of very stupid decisions. But if I make a dumb decision and I recognize that eventually that was a dumb thing to do, I think, okay, we dropped that. Let's get rid of that. What mistake did I make? How can I avoid doing it next time?

Okay, so one of the topics we've got here for today for Jim is why is he so fanatical about fitness? Now, Jim, what is your age? Just for everyone again?

67.

67. But he doesn't look it. And if you've watched the Day in the Life with Jim, you will see that every morning he goes for a 5k run on his treadmill. And he does that religiously every single day.

Well, not every day. Sometimes I'll play squash, and sometimes I work on the farm for a few hours. But I have some sort of vigorous exercise every day.

I stand corrected. So vigorous activity, though, every day you will do something, which is great to hear. So let's talk more about that. Why are you so firm believer that you have to do some form of vigorous exercise or activity every day?

Well, I base it on the guideline, is that half an hour of vigorous exercise. And vigorous exercise basically is something that doubles your pulse rate. So if your resting pulse rate, say 60, it gets you to 120. That's a good guide.

And you stay there for around half an hour. You try and stay.

I actually don't necessarily run that fast. Sometimes if I'm feeling a little bit down, I'll do, say, 9 kph instead of 10. So I might only run 4 1/2 K. So it doesn't matter. It's half an hour of vigorous exercise. That's the minimum, actually, ideally is longer. So when I'm at the farm, usually I'll spend three, four, five hours a day doing something very vigorous. Why do I do it? Partly it's about longevity. You will live longer if you stay fit. But mainly it's about. It's the psychology of it. Exercise gives you energy, it gives you vigor. I mean, I am 67, which is two years past the time when you're supposed to retire. And my mind is just bursting with new ideas. And all the time, and you know what I'm like. I come to the office and you just start sparking off ideas. And I talk with people and let's do this, let's do this. I have that kind of extreme energy. I'm so interested in things. I'm interested in science. I'm running my Research program. I'm looking at isn. I'm looking at new things happening all the time. It's that level of energy and vigor which is, I think, so much part of what exercise does. And the other thing is mood. Exercise has a remarkably great effect on mood. It is far, far, far more effective than any antidepressants on the market. And I think antidepressants are a, generally speaking, terrible idea. I think people want to be happy. You need to do things like get exercise, strong community, family bonds, sense of purpose in your life, sense of meaning in your job, those kinds of things. That's what makes for happiness. I think antidepressants have actually can ease the symptoms in the short term, but actually make things worse in the long term.

Yeah, I agree with you on that. And obviously, if you watch previous podcasts about Jim and I, we've talked about mental health and we probably both got a big experience in that field. And you're probably right, what you said then people go to the doctor that, let's say that's two weeks they've been feeling down for that. That's just straight away, I'll be, you know, antidepressants or whatever. Whereas they probably should look at their life as a whole. And that's what a doctor maybe should be trained in, I guess look at the life as a whole. Is that person overweight, overweight, maybe eat healthier, maybe exercise, plan, do this and do that, some alternative things, and that's the last resort. Because if anyone knows who's been on antidepressants or seen someone on antidepressants, you do. You do see the impact it has on them.

It's not a.

It's not the best sort of thing.

It does have an effect short term. It tends to boost serotonin, for example. That's one of the things these things do, which is great because it does relieve the symptoms. But what it also does is makes the body resistant, the brain resistant to serotonin. It actually, it actually dampens down the receptors. So they need more and more of it to have some effect, which is the same thing as drugs like heroin and cocaine do. They do very similar kinds of things. I just think they're a terrible idea. I mean, obviously exercise is part of it. Diet is another part too. Having a healthy weight, having a body mass index of between 18 and 25, mine's about 22. I think you're quite fanatical about that.

Because I remember talking to you one time before and I think you were like a kilo over your Ideal weight. And you're like, I've got to get back to.

Yeah, it was. Well, actually I, I got my weight up to my worst. It was. Was 68.6, 7.9, nearly 68, which is really. I waited for a long time and I decided, no, no, no, I'm going to stop eating so much chocolates, right. Desserts and stuff and all those kind of things. And last weight, I was down to just in like 65. Bit over 65 kilos.

You weigh yourself every day, don't you?

Most days, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. So let's talk about. Let's talk about more about the actual. Your favorite sort of exercise, obviously, for people who aren't know, is squash. You're a massive squash player. So when did you.

I'm not a very good squash player because I can beat most people around here because they don't play squash very much.

You go, all right, you go, right, I've been out there and watched you. Because when we film for the day in the life, you go pretty well. When you're playing, playing against that gentleman, you took a game off him and you're a lot older than most people, I would say, you play against.

Yeah, but the age has got a lot to do with being good at squash. You just have to be able to hit the ball. But I mean, there's. There's five levels at the squash club that I go to and I'm a sort of, you know, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. I'm a sort of a good 4 or maybe a very poor 3. That'd be where I am. I'm below average for that club, so I'm not that good at squash, but it's just fun. Squash is great game because it's so exciting, it's so interesting. And it's also. I'm a very competitive person, so, you know, if I'm playing squash against somebody, I will actually kill myself to get that shot back and to get that ball. So you really, really try hard at the end of the half an hour.

When did you develop your love for squash then? What age was it? Why did you like that game so much?

When I was a teenager, I used to play with my father a bit and so forth. It's always been a great game.

Is your father a handy player?

He was. Okay, yeah. It's interesting that squash is great too, because unlike something like tennis, if you're really good at tennis, you can play for hours and you can really get a sweat up. But when you're like me, you're not so good. You're always chasing balls. It's not really good exercise. But squash, because it's so easy to hit the front wall, it's actually the ball doesn't go very far. You just keep on moving and moving and moving. So it's very, very intensive exercise. And it's also interesting because when you're playing squash, you can hit the ball in so many different ways. You can hit it sort of fast down the front, you can hit it lob up the back, you can hit it off the left side wall, off the right wall. There's so many different shots that you can make, and often it's just a matter of figuring out not so much what the best shot is, but what the best shot is. Comparison with where the other person is. So it's a real competitive thinking game.

What's your favorite shot, then? What's your best shot, you reckon?

I'm not that good. I just love. I love the most things I love when I'm playing Vic, who's my normal best squash partner, is I just like to have a big rally. I like to get this guy running. If he's in the middle of the court, sitting on the tee, and I'm just hitting ball so he can get back, that's no good at all. I just want to make him run and run and run. Really, really good rally, where you. Where you go back and forth. You're just about staggering with exhaustion. And regardless of who wins, that's a real fun. That's a real fun thing.

So you like longevity of gravity. So there's a lot of shots. Lots of shots.

Lots of shots, yeah. Yeah. You should be playing squash.

I'm a cripple, as you say, Jim. I can't move. I've got a knee injury. It'd be bad for me. It's very short, sharp, right. Short, sharp. Bang, bang, bang, bang.

Yeah, probably is, actually. Yeah.

I'm too top.

That's interesting, though. I mean, I'm 67 and I exercise regularly. I have no joint problem problems, nothing. I've never had any kind of a sports injury.

Yeah, that's quite interesting. Did you have any injuries back in your day as a mowing, when you had a mowing business? Was there any injuries back then besides maybe a cut or two?

No, not really. I ran in bare feet on the farm. I sometimes get a bit of a cut in my foot sometimes or something. But I think actually you get injuries when your body's not accustomed to it. And I've never pushed myself. One thing I don't believe. I know it's in squash, you try and exhaust yourself to win the game. But in general, I never believe in pushing yourself too hard. When I started running, which must have been 15 years ago, regularly I would actually run for a bit and I would walk for a bit and I'd run and walk. So I never pushed myself too hard. Like this morning, I was feeling a little bit less energetic. So I set my. The treadmill on 9 instead of 10. Start off on 10. KPH went down to 9. So, you know, actually one of the great breakthroughs I've ever had in the. In the history of fitness was. Is Roman history. Right. Because what happened was I set up a. I was trying to run, but I was finding it very boring. So I set up this video with this BBC thing called I, Claudius, which is about the Roman Emperor Claudius. And I found that so fascinating that I actually found it so easy to go on running. And when I learned that pattern and then I watched other videos and now I do talking books and so forth, and it makes the time pass. I was listening to a talking book this morning about ice ages and so forth and how that's affected human evolution and that kind of thing. Why we have ice ages and continental drift and it's just fun, you know, by the time you've been doing that for a while, half an hour doesn't seem very long. And then have a cold shower.

Yeah. And you might even run longer if you. If you're listening to something you really, really like.

Yeah, sometimes I do, but usually treadmill's not my favorite. I'd rather play squash or work on the farm for sure.

So some of the cold, as you just said, then you're actually running bare feet as well. So people might not know you're actually running bare feet. So can you maybe talk a little bit about why are you running bare feet?

Bare feet actually have less injuries. One of the problems with running in cushioned shoes is you tend to put too much weight on the heel. And when you come down with the heel, I can't really show you here. You jar your whole leg. If you run in bare feet, you tend to work on the sole of the foot. So you put more weight on the sole and you don't jar on the heels, so it's always better. So when I'm on my treadmill or when I'm working on my farm, I'm always working and always use bare feet. And you become very tough after a while.

So you work in bare feet on the Farm as well.

Yeah.

I didn't know that.

I run on the farm and just do everything.

Yeah, okay. Wow. And also, you just said then after you do your treadmill, you go straight into a cold chair. So it might be very tough in Melbourne because it's obviously very cold all the time.

Well, once again, you see, the key to doing exercise is to do something that's not too difficult. Cold showers are good because it's an energizing thing. I also think cold water, it revs up your stress reaction. It's a eustress, It's a positive stress. It's something that. So exposure to cholinescence is a short, sharp chef shock, which gets you cortisol levels up and so forth.

It's good for the immune system, they.

Say gets your immune system going, get your stress system going. It's good for mood, it's good for all kinds of things. The point about this, too, it can't be too hard. So when you start, I would say to anybody, first of all, I would never have a cold shower first thing in the morning, you know, warm from bed. I would never do that. I only have it after a run when I'm really hot. And it gets very hot when you're running most of the year. I'll have a fan going overhead, so to keep myself cool. And then if you can start it in the summertime and then get used to it, by the time you get into the wintertime, you're just so accustomed to it. It's not very difficult. But I didn't even think about it very much. I just finished my run. I get into the cold shower. It's just. It's just automatic and it's not that difficult.

And I also say it's good for you to train your brain because you're in a situation which you don't want to be in. Most likely you're in a cold. Well, this is for most people. I'm in a cold shower. I'm an assistant. Resisting to stay in there. Whatever. It actually trains your prefrontal or whatever it is to actually stay in a situation you may not like. There's actually a lot of life coaches or people out there actually recommend cold showers because it's putting you into a situation where you're going to resist it, but you stay in that place to resist it so that you do it more and more and more. And it trains your brain to get used to uncomfortable situations, but it builds.

Character and stuff, and character is a matter of habits. If you discipline yourself on small Things, then it builds character in the long term. It's like. It's like just doing chores around the house, too. I mean, one of the things I do is clean up the kitchen, for example. Just go in and clean it up and empty the dishwasher and put things away. And this kind of stuff, too. You just do small things as a matter of course or make the beds. I don't want to make myself sound like I'm some hero. I clean the cabin once a week, so I don't clean toilets or anything like that. But little things that you do regularly is how you build character. And the same thing with my kids. It's like when they. Helping to take stuff from the. From the car, shopping from the car without being reminded and helping to unpack and just doing things without being asked and tidying their rooms and those kinds of little small things is what builds character in the long term. Yeah.

And you don't think about it. You never always do it, don't you? There's no procrastination. You just do it.

Yeah. It becomes very, very automatic. And look, all I can say is that I can't believe how good I feel. The age of 67, I am just full of beans. You know, actually, one of my many faults is impatience. But one of the problems I have is that if I'm in public, especially like a shopping center, everybody walks so slow. Here am I with people who are less than half my age and they're dawdling along, and I find that very difficult. I'm always trying to work out a way to get fast. All these people. I don't know anybody. I actually, when I'm in town, which is very rare, I'll often run through this. I've never seen anybody else do it, but I just have to. I just want to move. And I can't stand people who stay on escalators and just stand there and let the thing carry them up. It drives me mad. I just want to. Yeah, well, I know that's a good thing, but it certainly shows that you don't have to lose energy when you get older.

You started running it 15 years ago, so you would have been 52.

But I've always had exercise before that. You know, I used to play a lot of squash and do different kinds of things. It was more just a. It was the treadmill thing. Yeah, I mean, I've always kept fairly fit. And don't forget, I was mowing lawns until I was. I must have been 40, so. So it was kind of I've always kept pretty fit.

Yeah. So let's talk about your diet then. So diet's obviously a massive important part of your exercise and obviously helps with mood and stuff like that. So what is your diet consist of? What's Jim's diet? Jim's nutritional plan will say.

Well, it's pretty much what the doctors and nutritionists advise. It's largely vegetarian. I don't eat much meat, I'm not vegetarian as such. Have a bit of seafood occasionally, but I might go days without eating a scrap of any kind of meat. Obviously not too much fat. Try not to eat fried stuff. I'm not fanatical about it with my kids. I'll have an ice cream with them or something like that. Even cold rock, which is pretty decadent. But it's just a kind of a special occasion thing. So I'm not extreme about it, but I don't know, when you get used to it, you don't like. We go out to pizza restaurants, one of our favorite places. We go to La Pochetta and I'll order a small pizza, half and half margherita and sort of a vegetarian one. And we cut it in half and half a pizza and some side vegetables is a good meal for me. I don't know how people can eat a whole large pizza.

I can. I definitely can do it quite often.

But you will find if you keep on doing that when you're my age, you will be a little bit bigger than you are. Right. So it's. It's. You got to get accustomed to it, but eat a lot of fruit. One of the great things about having some money is that you just don't have to worry about things of that nature. So we have blueberries, we have strawberries, we have raspberries, we have apples, we have bananas, we have peaches. Whole kitchen peaches piled high fruit.

Yeah. We've done a day in the life of you, obviously, man. We did notice that when we walked in on the bench, there's a massive amount of just fruit sitting there. And you started purchasing it for the office as well. The Jim's home Fresh stuff. I remember we had it in there. It was great. It went pretty quickly, actually, which is really good. So you might have to get some more stuff in.

Yeah, well, it's every Monday and that's the same thing. Because I want my staff. I'm trying to get my staff to this one. I'm so keen to get our sporting complex going. I mean, it's only been three years. The council's been holding us up but eventually we will get through that. But I think it's good. I'd like to actually, you know, we provide fruit for the staff. I'd like them to have exercise. We've got a table to this table which is very popular. That keeps them moving. I would actually, when Jim's personal training gets going, I'd like to have a personal trainer come in one day, a fortnight and help people with their fitness goals. And I'm not. It's part of your staff perk but it's actually quite, it's quite self interested because if you keep your staff happy and energetic and well fed and they're going to do better work because in fact the thing I find it's so striking is that five minutes of clear thinking can do a lot more than five days of slog because you look at something and say why am I doing it this way? Why don't we do this instead? That clarity of thought, that energy that people have and loving what you do and having your heart in it but having also that state of mind that that's healthy is great.

No, I agree with you. I actually go to the gym because we don't. We hopefully we do get a gym because it'll help me out a lot. But I actually go to. I actually go in the middle of the day to the gym down here the local good life because I just, I have to do it, I don't know, wait till after work. So I find for me breaking up my work day by going to the gym in the middle of the day, it helps me a lot. So I can't wait for the actual. The gym on site here because it saved me a bit of money in the gym membership. But it's really important what you said, some sort of rigorous activity every day just for general health. No one has to become a bodybuilder or anything out but just for your general health benefits, your mood just so much benefits and hopefully the council someone watches this and lets the permit free so that Jim can do the gym. Because you're right, having the fruit there now is great. We obviously have the staff lunches and stuff but having the gym there to accompany the pool will be awesome for everyone here. Any more tips for anyone about fitness or. Well, maybe let's maybe just talk about a little bit about. Obviously you've got a routine which is pretty set. You obviously do your gym, you obviously have your. So you're running or your vigorous activity every day. Are there any days where you do it Every day. Where some people might start something, you might go, I'm going to do it every day. Then they get to a point where they go, I can't be stuffed, and I just don't do it. How about forming habits? How did you form these habits?

Forming a habit is hard. Once you've made it, it's easy. You just don't think about it very much. It's just so much part of my routine, part of my day. I just would. I'm just so used to it, and I try to make it pleasant. It's doing something that you like is so important.

Well, you added in the. So when you're doing the running, you don't like running too much, but you add it in. You watch audiobook or you might watch a series. So maybe adding that component in there for someone.

Yeah, but people shouldn't push themselves too hard. They should make it pleasant and then just get into the routine of it. And if I didn't, I don't know, I just feel bad if I don't get vigorous exercise. Look, it's very. Occasionally I don't. You know, sometimes biz will get going in the morning and. And things happen, one thing after another after another. But that's probably one day, a fortnight or a month. I might not do it, but generally speaking, I just want to do it because I like feeling good, I like feeling happy. My mood is very resilient. My wife Lee often says that I just like. I just can't get down about things. I just keep on pushing and pushing and pushing and things go wrong. That's okay. What do we do? What's the next step? Let's do this, do this, do this, and don't get discouraged. So much of success is to do with just your attitude towards life. It's not being brilliant. It's not knowing a whole lot of stuff. It's just keeping on trying and never getting discouraged.

Money never gets you down, doesn't it? That's what. I know exactly what you're saying, because I've seen it a few times where you might have something fail or you just seem to be able to compartmentalize it right there and go, oh, well, then bang. Next thing away you go. Whereas other people would dwell on that for years or for months or whatever.

Yeah, look, I don't see myself as being anything particularly brilliant. I make a lot of very stupid decisions. But if I make a dumb decision and I recognize that eventually that was a dumb thing to do, I think, okay, we drop that. Let's get rid of that. What mistake did I make? How can I avoid doing it next time? And it's good. And I encourage people to try and be One of the problems with being the boss is that sometimes people are too scared to cross you and they think that you'll offend them. I like people around me who don't mind telling me that I've made a mistake. I mean, if somebody can't tell me that, then they're not really as useful as somebody you can.

We'll leave it there. And thanks for adding that. Some business advice at the end as well about obviously pushing through failure, which is something that Jim talks about in some other videos as well, which we have. So make sure you subscribe to the podcast on itunes, Spotify and other places and also on YouTube as well. The video version is there. Got any questions for Jim? Please leave them as a comment or you can send them to social mediams.net or just private message, one of our various accounts and we'll put them to Jim. Okay, thank you.