Dr Greg Wells - Scientist - Author

This is episode 137 of the Empowered Team Podcast. Welcome to the Empowered Team Podcast, where we explore how to optimize your performance in career, sport, and life. And now, your host, vitality and peak performance coach Kari Schneider.

Welcome the amazing Greg Wells. I am so excited to have you with the Empowered Team Podcast. How are you today?

Really good, actually. Feeling. Feeling good. So did a run before this, so still sweating a little bit, doing the. Doing the shake as well as, you know, starting recovery now. But, yeah, we're feeling pretty good. We're healthy, we're safe, we're happy. So, you know, just grateful for this opportunity and grateful that we're. We're okay. I know a lot of people aren't right now, so, you know, just sort of taking it day by day and just, you know, enjoying the sun today and just having a good time. So all is good.

Amazing. Well, for our listeners, first of all, we're really pumped that you are practicing what you preach, because I can't tell you how many exercise physiologists I've been either working with or in touch with or whatever, and they know the knowledge, but they don't actually do the stuff. And I know you always have, and this has just been a part of your life and a part of what you believe in. So how, just for those who are in sport, those who are interested in all things health and wellness and performance, how did you get into your field of expertise? And if you want to explain to our audience exactly what your field of expertise is.

Sure. So sort of. I think I landed in this area by accident, almost, to be completely honest. Like, I. I was a competitive swimmer growing up. I broke my neck when I was 15, so sort of that sparked my interest in the human body and, you know, went through, recovered from that and was able to get back to swimming again. Didn't quite get to the level that I probably would have otherwise, but.

Hold on, skip over the fact you broke your neck when you're 15. That's kind of a big deal.

Yeah. So we were at a training camp down in Florida, and my buddies and I decided to go do some body surfing in the ocean before the swim meet that afternoon.

And the waves were young, male risk.

Taker would, a hundred percent. And the waves were massive, and the beach was super steep, so not a good place to go body surfing. Um, they're like, it was stormy and windy, and it was, you know, just not, not, not good. Uh, so anyway, I caught a really good wave. So did my buddy. Um, my eyes Were closed, my eyes were up, my hands were up above my head and it just dropped me, just took me right over the top and dropped me headfirst into the beach. And I broke three or four vertebrae in my neck. Uh, a buddy of mine was on the same wave. He actually opened his eyes, saw nothing but beach, put his arms up and he dislocated his shoulder. So, but at least he put his arms up. My eyes were closed, I was just going with it. And I took the, the full impact on the top of my head basically. So my neck exploded and then was in traction for almost four months. Got out of traction. They did neurosurgery on my neck on my 16th birthday. Did about three or four months of physiological, started swimming again the fall, in the fall. And about a year after that was able to qualify for Olympic trials, which was cool to, you know, sort of get through to that recovery. And then I swam all the way through university, which was great, super amazing experience, loads of fun. And my original plan actually in university was to go into business. But when I was deciding where to go, I wanted to swim. And University of Calgary had the best swim team in the world at the time. So I wanted to go there, but they wouldn't accept one of my maths. So I was like, well, I'll just do phys ed and I'll get the math and then transfer over. And in my first semester in phys Ed, I was like, oh my gosh, this is super cool. I was doing biomechanics, we were doing anatomy and dissecting bodies and I just loved it. So I stayed in phys Ed and that sort of, you know, began the journey. And then I did a master's and PhD at the University of Toronto in physiology. Then I did a postdoc in biomedical engineering at Toronto General in anesthesia, and then I did a two year postdoc at SickKids in respiratory medicine. I'm a combination of an exercise physiologist, respiratory physiologist, and I do work with Olympic level athletes. Have for almost 20 years was the director of sports science at the Canadian Sport Institute in Ontario. For a long time I also still to this day, I'm involved in the exercise medicine research program at Sick Kids Hospital where we use exercise for kids with cancer and cystic fibrosis and other challenges like that. So I work, I sort of think of it like as an extreme physiologist. I work with either elite athletes or children that are struggling with chronic illness. And then lately I've been Taking all of that information and converting it into books and speeches to help as many people as I can. So that's what I do.

That super cool, super, super cool. I love it, I love it. There's so many things I want to dive into there. One thing you pointed to is something that for the average population, I've tried to describe this a number of times in terms of a spectrum of performance or a spectrum of health that people often think of a high performance athlete as being this epitome of health. I would often say, well, actually they're at the extreme end, they're more susceptible to illness, they're more susceptible to problems and they're not necessarily in that realm of health because there's such a intense focus on a very, very specific thing. And you know, you just described it that you've got sick kids or dealing with certain populations that might be having challenges illness wise. And then also the high performance end. What have you learned from those extremes? Because there's so many areas that you can fill in, some that you've learned. What are some of the key. I know this is kind of a broad question, you may not be able to narrow it down, but some key things that you've really pulled from each end of that spectrum, pulled from the sick kids end and the research, the respiratory research, and pulled from working with high performance athletes that the general population would really be served to know.

Great question. I struggle with the answer to that question all the time thinking about it constantly, like what are we going to take away from this? What are we going to learn? Right.

Your books too?

Yeah, pretty much, yeah. And that's what the books serve to do is they serve to help me distill down everything that we're learning into simple frameworks that we can apply to help as many people as possible. So if I think, you know, as you were speaking and describing the elite athletes, the first thing that popped into my mind was the J shaped relationship between exercise and immune function. So for example, for the general population that doesn't exercise at all, which unfortunately is 85% of the population, doesn't get enough physical activity to prevent a chronic disease. So the vast majority of people do no exercise. That group will in general experience upper tract respiratory infection. So a cold or the flu. COVID 19 somewhere in the order of around three to four times a year. So some sort of respiratory infection three to four times a year, someone who's exercising at a moderate intensity, a moderate amount of time. So we're active on a daily basis, just active you know, probably getting anywhere between three and six hours a week, will get sick around once a year. So moderate activity improves health and improves resistance to illness. Exercise improves our resistance to infections, to colds and flus and viruses and bacteria. Uh, however, if you train a lot or you change the amount of training that you are doing drastically, so a radical increase in your training, your body doesn't spend its energy fueling and maintaining your immune system. It goes to repairing and regenerating your muscles and therefore your immune system gets weak and you actually get sick, sick a little bit more often. So that actually turns into a J shaped relationship. Now you can build yourself up to tolerate 20 to 30 hours a week. That can be normal for you. And if you're incredibly fit, that would be considered to be moderate. But Even someone training 30 hours a week, who goes into a training camp and bumps up to 45 hours a week, that person would be at risk. So when we did training camps, for example, we would always be super careful to, you know, wash your hands on the plane on the way home. We didn't wear masks back then. We might in the future just to protect the system because you're run down and you would. Typically a lot of athletes would get sick on the, you know, days after a training camp or even the days after a competition. And so we really needed to protect against that. So health and performance are two very different things. But what we've discovered is that when you combine those together and you have truly world class health, it unlocks the potential for you being able to perform to your best at whatever it is that you are capable or interested in doing. We cannot separate health and performance, and that has been separated traditionally not considered to be the same thing. I actually think they're one and the same. So that goes for an executive. If you want to be a world class business performer, you need to be eating well, you need to be sleeping well, you need to be doing your mindfulness, you need to be getting your workouts in so that you can function at the highest level and think at a world class level for an athlete, you need to be training, but then maintaining your nutrition, your massage therapy, your mental health work in order to. Mental health work is probably not the way of describing it. Mental health skills in order for you to be able to tolerate the training and stay healthy. And then we take that right back to sick kids where I work and do do some research even that even those kids who are really not struggling will do exercise tests that are just small versions of what the Olympic Olympic athletes do sick kids. Every three months the kids come in and they do a VO2 max test, just like the Olympic athletes do. It's the same test. They just don't get to as high of a level. And so even for that group, you're trying to optimize nutrition, you're trying to optimize sleep, you're trying to help people to exercise as much as possible. What we've learned. This will be the last thing I say. I'll shut up as I go off on various different rants and various different tangents. But one of the most important things I think that we've learned at SickKids is that when we do exercise intervention studies, we take a group of children that are struggling with a specific disease and do either an endurance training intervention or a strength training intervention, or even a yoga or mental health like a mindfulness intervention. That's fine. And it usually results in improvements in a number of different health and disease metrics that the workouts help. They do. They make these kids better. No question. It's pretty universal across all illnesses if you're specific. However, what works even more, what's more highly correlated with, with positive disease outcomes is general physical activity. Basically the number of steps that you're taking during the course of the day so you can do the workouts, that's fine. The problem is you get off the research intervention, you get off the training program and you revert back to zero. Whereas the people who are doing. I'm just generally physically active. I walk to school, I ride my bike on the weekends, I get off one subway stop early and walk to work. Like that's the magic for us. And that's hard for me as like an Olympic physiologist. Right.

Like desk work to do.

Oh, I'm just like, we could be doing all of these heart rate zones and you need to hit certain targets. I've actually thrown all of that out.

Yeah.

And I'm just like, let's do more. That's it. Go for a walk, go for five minutes. That's going to help 99% of the population even. Adam Vancouverdon, Olympic kayaker, four consecutive Olympics before know, world record holder, gold medalist. I mean, his go to workout was a 30 minute run because it's easy, you can do it anywhere and it's super maintainable. So anyway, just a few thoughts for you, a few ideas to throw it.

There's so much there that I love, I love. I just, I want to dive so, so deeply into it. The. So the step counts. For instance, that's there was a lot of step count research being done in the lab that I did my research, which is on back and heart rate variability and stuff like that. But the STEP research back 15 years ago when they were just. At that time it was accelerometers, there weren't any Fitbits, there weren't any of the tech gadgets that everybody has. It was that there was a lot of studies on kids and at the same time bringing it over into adults as well in terms of the optimal steps. And at the time for kids it was 16,000 steps and for adults it was 10,000 steps. And it still basically is as far as I can tell from the research. But the other things that were coming out over the last decade is exactly what you're saying in terms of. There have been studies showing people getting their 30 minutes to one hour of exercise in per day, but if they're sedentary the entire rest of the day, they don't show the health markers that somebody would if they had broken up that hour of activity in multiple spots throughout the day. What we would call in exercise science, which is neat, the non exercise activity time or non exercise activity thermogenesis. So that someone's getting all of this activity throughout the day instead of in a single bout. And in as little as 12 hours of either bed rest or even sedentary behavior that starts to show cellular changes in our bodies that have the advers markers or the markers are showing that we're declining or we're going to have poor health. So I love just how clear it is for as you're showing this with kids and it's just being shown over and over again. The other thing I wanted to just ask about is there's from what I've gathered over the last several years, that if somebody's in that stress zone and it doesn't matter whether they're in exam time, whether they've had a really stressful bout at work, whether they've put themselves through a hard round of training for three weeks straight or two a days or something like that, this really stressful span of time that raises the cortisol, they've got extra inflammation going on in their body. But as far as I can tell from some of the research that's now being shown to be immune protective until the stress stimulus stops. And then at that point if the person's regular immune system just isn't robust enough, then they're typically going to get sick after the stress stimulus stops. Their cortisol level goes down, the inflammation goes down overall, and then they're more susceptible to illness or whatever. The thing is, unless they have been you know, adapted or accommodated to whatever that stressor was, does that. Does that make sense? Does that align with some of the things that you've seen? Or how would you describe what I'm. With what you've seen?

There's a lot there. So much we could go like. We could flip this interview around and I could just keep asking you questions about all of that, which is amazing. So my PhD student, Jillian White, did a bunch of. She's graduated now. So Dr. Jillian White did her research on inflammation and immune function and stress and cancer in children with cancer. She did some really interesting blood work and a lot of MRI research on the brain. And in general, I think for everybody, how we can sort of take that research and apply it to ourselves and clear some of this up is just sort of think about what happens to us when we are injured or when we get sick. So let's imagine you have a knife, you're chopping veggies, you cut your finger, and over the course of a few days, you see that cut go from bleeding to a scab to the redness all around the scab. And then eventually it heals and the scab falls off and you might have a scar. Hopefully not, but it heals. That whole process is the inflammatory immune response. So the redness is the inflammation response, the healing process is our immune response. And that exact same process happens if you are sick. Let's say you get a cold, that your nasal passages are inflamed, there's an immune response that kills off all those viruses, and then you get healed afterwards, you recover, and you regenerate and you heal. Similarly, inside the human body, when you are stressed, there's a cascade of immune responses. So when you're stressed, what happens is you perceive a threat from the environment and the body prepares itself for running or fighting. And it assumes that you're going to get injured. Therefore, it dumps all sorts of white blood cells, your immune system, the cells that actually make up the active part of your immune system. Those white blood cells get dumped out into your blood so that they're circulating around your body in case you get cut. And then immediately they can attack all the viruses and bacteria and fungus that gets into those cuts and creates an infection. So it's designed sort of proactively keep you. The problem is that that works really well for a few minutes, but then actually, since all of those white blood Cells have been dumped in and your thymus gland is empty, and you know your bone marrow is empty, you then have a decrease in your immune system function thereafter. I'm broadly generalizing by the way, so it's. There's tons of different nuances to this, but in general you have an increase in your immune system activity during stress, but then afterwards there's a decrease which makes you more likely to get sick. Just think about times when you've been super stre, you've lost your job, going through a divorce, reading COVID 19 headlines like whatever it happens to be, you do that for a period of time, you feel super stressed, and then afterwards you feel exhausted and you are quite likely to get sick. Ironically enough, it increases your likelihood of getting ill. So we need to make sure that when we're doing this, we are planning by the way. And exercise is a stressor too, right? So if you go and do a hard workout, that's a stressor you had, and you break down muscle tissue, you break down your, your blood cells and your body responds full body inflammation, which triggers the repair and regeneration of all of your muscles. It sparks the increase of new mitochondria, more red blood cells, better brain tissue. If in all of these cases, whether you're ill, whether you're stressed, whether you do a workout, the game for all of us is understanding that it is that immune system. It is that inflammatory response that heals and repairs and regenerates us. So it's actually really good because it gets rid of the viruses and bacteria. It helps you to recover and rebuild from stress, and it helps you rebuild your body from exercise training so that you ultimately get stronger, fitter, faster. So allowing yourself to go through that process is the magic. And then the way that we support getting through that process better and faster is sleep, stress reducing activities like mindfulness meditation, listening to music, getting out in nature, getting a massage, doing a light, light exercise, that's not stressful at all, like going for a walk with your kids. Um, it's that recovery and regeneration time that allows you to heal, recover, regenerate, recharge, rebuild to get stronger, fitter, faster over an extended period of time. So we need to leverage that process, which one of the reasons why I worry about triathletes, for example, constantly biohacking recovery and trying to short circuit the immune inflammatory response means that you're actually not getting the benefits of training. There's some, some research that shows that we know that vitamins, ACD and E are anti inflammatory. That's really Great. Because decreasing inflammation overall reduces your risk for cardiovascular disease, cancer, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome, depression. But if you're constantly taking anti inflammatory or antioxidant, I should say, vitamins and minerals right after your workouts, you don't go through the inflammation process and there's no stimulants for your muscles to adapt and get stronger. So we need to. Same thing with cold tubs, same thing with massage. There's times to focus on recovery and regeneration in and around competition, for example, and there's times to allow yourself to go through the full inflammatory process in order for it to make your body work properly.

Yeah.

So yeah, I'll stop there.

In order to almost complete the cycle of what's supposed to be there for the actual adaptation part of it because.

Thank you. That's what I meant to say.

Stimulus. Yeah. If we've given the stimulus, but we're not actually allowing the body to adapt to the stimulus and the breakdown, then it's never going to be able to get that step, that incremental improvement, the, you know, the overreaching, the super compensation, all of the fun things that come along with why we've done the stimulus in the first place. You know, sometimes it's the. But you know, it's the flip side. They're always. If there's the stimulus or the intensity, the flip side is always going to be the recovery, the downtime, the rest, relaxation, the intermittent play, the change in focus. And so many of the personality types in endurance sport or individual sport. I always found that with team sport I would try and have my team sport athletes have the mindset of an individual sport athlete. So train more like an individual sport athlete. And the individual sport athletes sometimes just, you know, try and get them to train a little more like a team sport athletes. Because it seemed that the two extremes were so different from a personality standpoint. And the ones on the team that were more driven, like an individual sport athlete usually would, would really elevate the rest of the team. And the individual sport athletes, you'd usually have to pull them back because they'd always do above and beyond what the prescription was. Thinking more must be better. And I'm generalizing, but there seems to be so much of a personality component that ends up becoming the limiting factor, if you will, for the performance. Sometimes instead of, instead of a physical or physiological factor, sometimes it's a personality or a mindset factor. What do you think of that?

So my good friend Ray Zahab, world record expedition adventurer, what does he say? 90% is mental and the rest is in your head. Right? So. And I had the incredible opportunity of going to three Olympic Games with CTV as a sports science. One is just I slept, schlepped cables all over the place. And then the other two times I went and I was able to be a sports science analyst. And what I saw there was that the athletes who managed the, managed to stay focused and avoid the distractions of the Olympics were in general, the ones who were able to perform at their, at their best. And so I think that the closer that we get to the actual performance moment, the less physiology matters and the more mindset matters. But then we also have what Philip McKernan refers to as heart set or soul set. And that's just, you know, your emotions and your purpose and meaning and all those sorts of things. So to simplify it as like physiology is the determinant of performance, or personality, slash, mindset is a determinant of performance or even emotional state or spiritual state as being, you know, the determinant of performance, I think is simplifying. And I think that when we consider those four different areas, you know, mind, body, emotion and spirit. Spirit, if you want it, if you want it in a religious context, can be that. Or you can just think about purpose and meaning behind what you do and what you're into and what you, what you love to do. You know, when we have those four areas working together, that's when I think true human potential is unleashed. And you can get help on the body side from a physiologist or kinesiologist. You can get help on the mental skills side from sports psychologist or clinical psychologist or whoever you want to get, depending on what your challenge in that area is. And then on the emotional and soul set side, we can build community around ourselves. We can surround ourselves with people that make it easy for us to be better and to elevate our lives. There's really cool research from the Blue Zones by Dan Buettner. Dan Buettner's work that was summarized in the Blue Zones book and the articles in National Geographic. When he traveled the world to find the regions where people lived to be centenarians, most likely to live to be centenarians 100 years old, he found a community. That sense of belonging to a community was one of the core factors that enabled people to live to 100, along with daily habitual physical activity, not necessarily workouts, along with a largely something in the order of, in and around a Mediterranean style of eating. You know, those sorts of, those sorts of things as well. So yeah, when we, when we work on mind, body, emotion and spirit, that really is what leads us to I think, long term, consistent, sustainable personal growth. And the cool thing about it is then it's not just your sport, it's not just your activity, it's also your job, it's also your family life, it's also your community life. It's also your own happiness that comes along for the ride. So that's where, and actually it was sort of, ironically enough, when we, when I worked with the Olympic athletes with the Canadian Sport Institute, as a director of sports science, one of my roles there was to build and lead what are called integrated support teams. And so around we would identify coach athlete tandems that had metal potential. And then we would organize groups of people, of professionals around those athletes. And the groups of professionals would be, for example, a strength and conditioning coach, a physiologist, a nutritionist, a mental skills trainer and medical staff like an athletic therapist or if they needed a medical doctor, they would go get a med med docs for whatever happens to be. And when we had those great ists, integrated support teams around the coach athlete tandems that really helped to compete internationally because you know, you're up against other countries who are supporting their athletes in a similar, in a similar way. The cool thing that we can all do is take that strategy and apply it to ourselves and we can learn from. I mean just think about the fact that you have access to the knowledge of some of the most incredible people in the world via podcasts, right, via YouTube. And you have to be careful about who you're listening to and don't go down the rabbit hole of spending hours a day watching YouTube. That's the last thing we need to be doing. But you can look up the top people, the top strength and conditioning experts in the world and get their, get their suggestions on how to, you know, how to, how to train appropriately. We can get some of the top mental skills trainer and sports psychologists to give you literal training on digital training, virtual training on and you, so you can build these networks around yourself to unlock your potential. Of course, we then lead into making sure that you are gathering that training, gathering that information from trusted sources, not just random conspiracy theory blog posts that you find on the website on whatever topic it is the echo chamber of whatever happens to be raging on Facebook at any given moment. So we have to be very careful. And my colleague Kunal Gupta has described that as curating the trusted web. So making sure that you gather your own trusted web of experts that are going to be your source for information. Precision nutrition for nutrition, for example, would be in. Dr. John Berardi is where I get a lot of my nutrition information. Because I trust John. He's a good guy and he does his research and he presents information in a very, very structured, well thought out, well researched way around nutrition. You just need to find people like that that can elevate your game and help you get to your potential in mind, body, emotion, spirit. Back to the original question that you asked me like 20 minutes ago. So.

You'Re so aware.

Barely. I was like, what was the question again? Oh, yeah, that's what it was. Okay, better, better wrap it up and bring it back to the starting point again.

Awesome. I love it because with. I have said this a number of times to my clients. It's that knowledge is not power anymore. The information is so expansive and so massive in terms of what we have access to now. Unlike Twitter 20 years ago, 30 years ago, we just have so much at us now. Clarity or focus or discernment ends up being more of the power now so that we can decide what's going to be useful for our needs. And that is, you know, with, you know, I don't want to get too much in on social media or what's available, but in order, there's so much out there, there's so much noise that in order to get attention, some people will be putting very polarized opinions or. And it doesn't matter whether it's strength and conditioning or healing or research or whatever it is, they'll really try and highlight the extreme in order to draw the eyes or draw the ears. And for the consumer out there, it's take a look, just do due diligence, do that little extra bit on, see, seeing where that person comes from and why and where they get their knowledge or what, you know, what their, what their purpose is. Are they someone who's really passionate about. And that's why I'm very grateful to have you on because this is your life's work, you know, your life's work. If there was. I don't want to speak for you, but this is what you've put your entire time, your life, your energy into is figuring these things out to come away with something that you can simplify for people to be able to consume and go, okay, now I get it now. These are the best things. Now having said that people, I find that people tend to know that, oh wait, I do need some rest. Sleep is better. Oh, vegetables are good. Oh, yes. And I am supposed to exercise. They know all these things, things. I'm seeing more and more that it's coming down to the skill set that's missing is the ability to change their own behaviors or behavior change skill set. How are you? Is there, in terms of you have a few books, you've got four different books. Is one of them really the kind of go to want to say, okay, this is the step by step in order to actually, actually narrow down how you can easily start to make those shifts.

So great thoughts, just a few sort of responses to, you know, dig deeper into what you just said, which was I'm closing my eyes to think my way through it because it's super awesome. It is very, very difficult to discern and curate information. And so we have knowledge freely available, but wisdom is less freely available. So we want to be sort of matching up knowledge with wisdom. And to some extent, let's not get confused by all of the extremism that's on the web and by extremism. Let's just keep that exclusively focused on health and fitness. Right? So it could be something like vegetables are going to kill you or plant based eating is the only way forwards or carnivore eating is the only way forwards or I don't know, like whatever it happens to be, just remember that humans are the only species that need a food guide, right? Like you know what's good, you look at it, you know if it's good for you or not. Eat the rainbow, eat largely plants. Have some organic grass fed beef that wasn't raised on GMO corn, you know, wild fish. Like this is not rocket science. We know what to do. Chips are bad, you know that you can still choose to have them, but they're not that good for you. For me, the weakness is ice cream. For anyone that's heard me speak before, you know that's a problem. That's why it cannot be in the house, right? If it's in the house, I will eat it. It cannot be here. So you know, and you can trust yourself and your intuition on all of this. We know that extreme styles of exercise are fine for short periods of time if you have a specific goal. If you're trying to finish a marathon under three hours, you got to do some pretty extreme cardio training. But the vast majority of us just need to go for a walk and that's more than enough and really great. So we can keep things super simple, super basic, super straightforward and there's benefits with everything in as little as 60 seconds. 60 seconds of meditation consistently is enough to change the white matter tracts inside your brain. Five minutes of walking a day consistently for a year would probably help you get rid of lower back pain and deal with the physical inactivity epidemic that is an independent risk factor for chronic diseases, regardless of how much you exercise. Which then sort of leads us into the idea that you sort of finished with in that last sort of information download, which was all around behavior change, which is the magic, because you can know everything, but if you don't execute on it, it's problematic. And I'm not perfect by any stretch of the imagination. I wish I trained more, I wish I ate healthier, I wish I slept better. I wish I did mindfulness more often. You know, balancing everything between work, family, kids, life, right? Like, I had a great workout plan for Monday, but I wasn't, didn't do it because at 2 o' clock in the morning I was in the hospital getting a cat, getting my son a cat scan for his concussion because he crashed in the park that day, he's totally fine. But when you don't sleep because you're up all night in the hospital, you're not getting your workout done. It's totally okay. We're balancing everything out. So the game really is just about, I think let's keep it super simple, infinitely achievable, keep those goals when it comes to health and fitness, inspirational. But when it comes to what you do on a daily basis, very achievable. And so if you're, if you're wondering, I'd like to do a marathon, let's just start. But you're not doing anything right now. Let's start with, I'm going to go for a 15 minute walk every single day for a month. And just simply the act of teaching yourself and training yourself to schedule time, defend that time, put your shoes on, get out the door, go for that 15 minute walk, come back in, reset to get back to work or back to your family life or whatever it happens to be that in and of itself is so powerful. And if anyone wants some great information on behavior change and getting more consistent, I think the book the Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg from Harvard is an excellent place to start. I actually think you could probably read the first two chapters and then just not bother with the rest of it because everything you need to know is literally in the first 30 pages of that book. So, yeah, that's that. The behavior change, the wisdom, the application of knowledge, the using yourself as a laboratory, all of that is great and super important. But I honestly believe that the simpler that we can keep it, the more basic that we can keep it, the more consistent you can make it, the better it's going to be for you. And ultimately it comes down to just do stuff you love. You know, like if you're doing things that you love, that's easy to get motivated.

It's going to, it's going to hit your, you know, your spirit, you know, just lightening up your day as well as whatever the other boxes of activity.

A hundred percent like. It's very easy for me to get motivated to go skiing in the winter. I really love it. It's super easy for me to get my stuff on, get out the door, like go to the lift. And it's super easy for me to go mountain biking in the summer. It's super easy for me to go paddleboarding on the lake. Like, I love all that stuff. Um, I do not like doing accounting. It's extremely hard for me to do that.

And you don't get any exercise doing it either.

So it's easy for me to motivate myself to go for a bike ride. It's not so easy for me to go and double check that all my visa statement charges are actually accurate. But they're both important. But it's the point about choose things you love, find the foods that you love, find the activities that you love, find the people that you love and just do more of that, I think makes behavior change a lot less stressful, a lot less difficult, A lot less challenging. Because love makes it easy for you to be motivated to do whatever it is that you love to do. Just do more of that, assuming it's good for you.

Yeah, I love that you said infinitely achievable because it implies that. Yes, not only is it something that you can continue to do for years or days or whatever it is, but also achievable to me implies that it's something that is progressing you or growing you. It's not just the infinitely same is the infinitely achievable. So I really love that term. So I'll probably rip it off you and use it a number of times.

Yeah, I just made it up and I probably stole it from someone else unconsciously. So yeah, just go for it. It's all good. It's definitely not Greg's term.

And then also what you're pointing to in the 15 minutes a day, just that something that you love. I have a friend who, he has a three minute rule and it's his three minute exercise rule. And he just. Whether it's two things, it's either exercising or getting outside. And he just makes the promise to himself that he'll do it for a minimum of three minutes. So as long as it's been three minutes, then that he's met his minimum standard. And it's typically going to be much more than that because once he's there, once he's done the three minutes, he feels amazing, he wants to keep going, so it's going to be more than that. But just that little bit, that promise to himself of the bare minimum typically keeps the consistency instead of having the inconsistency sneak in. Because as soon as we think it has to be an hour, as soon as we think it has to be whatever, that's when we tend to back away from it because you're exhausted, you didn't get the sleep or there are so many other things. There's the overwhelm or whatever it happens to be.

Yeah, I want to lean into that because it's a really important, um, point. Because it doesn't need to be an hour, it doesn't need to be perfect. Your shoes don't need to be done up, you don't have to have the perfect workout gear. You just need to move your body. And back in 2015, I was training for Ironman and at that point I was like, oh, I just, you know what? I've got. The meeting went over. I don't have 90 minutes to do my workout that scheduled. I was like, ah, forget it. And they all, you know what, you still got 75 minutes. You just, you know, like, just go. And as soon as I was like, it doesn't have to be perfect. You know, I don't necessarily, I was like, oh, my running gear is not washed. Like, oh, whatever, you're wearing smelly gear today. Mine, right? It doesn't have to be perfect. Just go. And then the other thing that is so important is the three minute rule. I typically said five minutes, but three minutes is great. Just start, right? If you don't just go for a walk, if you're supposed, you know, like, let's say you're supposed to, you're on that day, you do not feel like doing your run. Just start. And if after that five minutes you don't want to keep going, that's totally okay. I tried to do a workout on Monday after being up all night at the hospital. I went to the gym, set up the yoga mat, got on the yoga mat, was doing a guided yoga session and 10 minutes in, I found myself lying on the mat staring at the ceiling as I was listening to the guy tell me to do another downward dog. And I was like, this is just not happening today.

Yoga osmosis.

I was like, just lying on the floor, I was like, this is not happening. So I was like, forget it. Going back, done. Like not happening today. And then today I went for a run and I'm feeling way, way better and way happier. So the five minute rule is key. It will get you doing so much more. If after five minutes you still don't want to do it, you can go home. But I would bet that 99% of the time you don't and you keep going. And that's the key. Just start, do it for three minutes, do it for five minutes, whatever it happens to be. And that's the, that's the magic for just building that consistent routine. And it can be movement, it can be drinking water, it can be doing green tea instead of coffee, it can be doing three minutes of meditation, it can be staring out the window at nature for three minutes, it can be absolutely anything. We're just trying to sprinkle health improvement into our lives. Non judgmentally, non pressure, just do more, right? Just start.

Little spices of health. I want to bring this toward you personally because I know that if I think of a lot of the athletes that I've worked with and none of us are getting any younger, and you're might, you might be over 35 and being over 35 potentially, then you come from a history of severe neck trauma. Has that come back to bite you a bit? Because most of, for myself, for a lot of other athletes, that old ACL reconstruction, the back injuries, the shoulder dislocations, the whatever has come through the impacts sports or just either chronic traumas from very repetitive sports. For you personally, with your neck, have you noticed the differences as you've gotten a little over 30 and you know, are there certain things you've had to do specifically?

So you're very kind to say the word 30. That's hilarious. As I approach my 50th birthday in two months. So, yeah, broken neck, broken wrist, herniated discs in my L spine, torn ligaments in my right knee, multiple sprains of my right ankle. Like my whole goal is to live life so. And just like to push the limits so much that in 10,000 years, if someone happens to dig up my skeleton, they're going to be like, what happened to this guy? Right? Like that's kind of where I'm thinking and you know, like this. The knee injury was paddle boarding on the Pacific Ocean off Nicaragua. The herniated discs was a cycling race that I did after riding my bike across Africa. The broken wrist was crashing my bike in front of a truck on Young street and in Toronto and like on and on and on. I could go through all of these different moments but yeah, they catch up to you. And the game now for me has been becoming consistency around physical activity. And the way that I've made myself more physically active more consistently is to build a group of about 6ish of my friends. And every single time that we do a workout we send each other a text message and we do monthly challenges and it might be distance, it might be recovery, it might be strength and conditioning, it might be whatever it happens to be. But every month we're on it, we're always doing something. And then this has been going on for about three years now and by far this has been our best year that we've ever been at it. So we are now um, really, really enjoying that. So consistency of training, massively important. And I've gone away from having to do the ultra long workouts that I love. The three four, five hour bike rides, love that stuff into more. I'm just going to go 30 to 60 minutes, maybe longer, but I'm going every single day. It could be yoga, could be walking, could be hiking up the mountain, could be lifting weights, could be running, could be cycling. I don't care what it is, but I literally don't care. I'm just doing a workout every single day.

Unless you were training for something specifically.

A hundred percent, which we're not right now. Cause the entire world, every event in the world's been canceled. So I'm just training and actually loving it a lot more than I did when I was on a structured program. And then in addition to that I've become very interested in anti inflammatory nutrition. So the more anti inflammatory I eat, the better I feel. So right now, for example, doing a shake from that super berry ultimate from Living Fuel, lots of green tea, tons of vegetables, the rainbow, loads of healthy fats, olive oil, avocado, coconut, shifting towards organic grass fed meat as much as possible and trying to find, although it's extremely difficult, sustainable wild fish, those sorts of, you know, those sorts of things are the direction that we're going and it's making all the difference in the world. We also have done little things like a weekly massage. Absolute game changer. Learned that from Robin Sharma. Yoga has become an absolute go to for me on and I've. I'm up to like four or five times a week, 30 to 45 minutes. That is completely healing and fixing so many things in my body loving career.

Body meditation for your mind as well.

Yeah. And actually what I've been doing is finishing the yoga with the, with like 1015 minutes of, of meditation. So that's leveraging the map workout research mental and physical showing that meditation right after exercise improves your mental health more than meditation or exercise alone. So doing that quite a bit has been a game changer. So yeah, just lots of different things that, that have enabled me to be healthier this year than I think I've been in probably 20 years. And we'll see once the world opens up again we can start doing events where that, where that all lands.

So yeah, that's incredible. I like the for, for part of what I, what I'm aiming at is live long, die fast.

Oh yeah.

You know, the people who are, you know, let's say we're 113, 130, something like that and dying fast. Not the long chronic disease kind of thing.

Totally. Like 110 great years, two bad days would be my perfect situation. Right? Absolutely.

We did it really, we lived it big and then done good. Good.

Yeah.

You, you have, you have a family. You are diligent on your training and really living big and experiencing the world. You are involved in research and different projects and consulting. There's a lot that's going on in your overall schedule. If it wasn't Covid, I know you'd be traveling all over the place as well. Can you give our listeners a couple of key tips on scheduling and time overall? Because it's, you know, we all have the same amount of time you're managing yourself in order to schedule your life. What is there a couple of key tips that you've found or rules that you have that really are non negotiable or really work for you?

Yeah, it's a work in progress and some days are good and other days are not good. And you know, I always feel like I could be doing more although I'm sort of letting that go as much as I possibly can these days to worry less about getting volume done and more on getting specific projects done that are going to move the needle more while also spending time with my kids. And this whole COVID lockdown and non travel has actually been great for me because I've been spending more time at home and not on airplanes and in hotels and I'm going to maintain that moving forwards, I'll travel deliberately, but not compulsively, shall we say, in the future. So the single most important thing that has been a game changer for me in terms of overall accomplishment and accomplishing things and success, probably that has been developing over the last three to five years, has been shifting from time management, living out of my calendar and my email inbox, to priority management, which is spending my time on important things, not urgent things. So that's the Eisenhower principle, and I'm certainly not the first person to talk about this, but it is an absolute game changer when you spend time thinking about what matters to you the most and then allocating your time and probably even more importantly, allocating your limited attention to those things that matter to you the most, which means defending your time and defending your attention. So saying no to things that do not move the needle, saying no to requests from the like, I get a ton of requests. I wish I could do them all. But I've been choosing to say no a lot for the last two years to save time and leave time open. And that has been super helpful because then when amazing opportunities come along, and they always do, you've just got to have faith, you know, trust that they will. Then you've got the time to allocate to those incredible opportunities. And it might be as simple as, hey, dad, can you play Lego with me? Right? And you're like, yes, I can play Lego with you right now, because I've got an hour, let's do it. And it could be business as well. It's like, you know, Greg, can you jump on this podcast? And it just so happens, yes, I can at that time. But the vast majority of time I'm probably not doing that. I'm focused on building the app, for example, that we're, that we're working on, called Vivio. By the way, if anyone's checked out V I I V I O, check it out. Blatant self promotion there. But yeah, the game really is priority management, not time management. Spend some time and attention on figuring out what matters to you, what you love doing, what's going to elevate your life, what's going to help you lead the life that you want to lead, have the health that you want to have, and then as relentlessly as you can, defend your time and attention and create the environment that makes it easy for you to do so, so that you can actually allocate more of your time to that. This is a work in progress for me, actually. Covid has helped because it's wiped out my schedule and enabled me to rebuild things from scratch. So I would say, like, this last six months has been the most productive, the most healthy, the most high performing that we, that we have had, both Judith and I, in a very, very, very long time. We're healthier, we're happier, we're higher performing. And it's because we've rebuilt our lives from scratch during pandemic time to really focus on the things that matter to us. Journaling has been huge. Gratitude practices has been huge. Doing the deconstruction protocols on a weekly basis around what I'm doing and why, it's been super helpful and yeah, it's going well. And that idea of focusing on your priorities, not time, I think is a critical one for a lot of people to consider.

Amazing. I love it. I was going to actually ask your favorite apps, but before I ask about any other ones, what can you tell us what your app, the one that you're working on, what does it track? What's the emphasis for the purpose of it?

Got it. So a little while ago I wrote a book called the Ripple Effect and the Ripple effect went quite viral all over the world. It was pretty incredible, totally changed my life. It was awesome. And the principle behind the Ripple effect was to focus on sleep, nutrition, exercise and mindset. And when you do those four things, they have a ripple effect and they help each other. So sleep better makes it easy to make good decisions around food. Once you're eating better, you got more energy, you can exercise. Once you exercise, your mental health improves and vice versa, and back and forth through all of those different relationships. So we wanted to be able to help people implement those ideas more. So we created an app. It's called Vivio VII V I O. It's Latin for life. That's where the name comes from. And what it does, it uses the sensors in Apple Watch to track your sleep, track your exercise, track your mindset, and enable you to input your nutrition scores. Each of them, from 1 to 10 on a daily basis, aggregates it into a total, total score, which we run through an algorithm which pulls out information to share with you on a daily basis, but how you can get better. So it's sort of like an artificial intelligence coach in your pocket and currently built for Apple Watch and iPhone. We will at some point do an Android version, but right now that's what we're up to and it's been pretty incredible. We've got a ton of people using it right now, which is absolutely Mind blowing. And we're working our way through, you know, upgrading it as much as we possibly can. We just did a huge sleep update, which, you know, is just mind blowing. What data you can collect from these wearables these days to give you information about how you can get better. So, yeah, we're just trying to democratize all of the science and put it on everybody's wrists and make sure that it feeds you information on a daily basis that's totally customized, totally personalized, like for you, based on your own data. So, yeah, that's what we're up to. And if anyone wants to check it out, we would be totally honored. The basic level is free, allows you to track everything. If you want the calendar, you know, historical data and trends and the daily focus tips, there's a pro version, but you don't need that if you just want to track your own physiology. You can totally use it if you have an Apple watch.

That's super cool. I want to be mindful of time. I have one question that might take you just down the rabbit hole a little bit here. You mentioned sleep and I know you take a look at sleep a fair bit. Some of your audience. Some of my audience are going to be women. A lot of them are going to be women who are training, who might be, have a lot of demands in the world. They eventually, when they're past their 40s, will go into menopause and the sleep for many of them gets thrown out the window. Anything that you've found specific to that population that has, either with your app or through your research, that makes a big difference?

Yeah, two things. Obviously, I'm a male, I'm 50, I know nothing about what I'm about to talk about. So it's purely research. And. But for funny enough, I've actually been working on menopause for about 30 years. I got asked to work on menopause as a physiologist back in the mid-90s for a pharmaceutical company called Siba Geige that doesn't even exist anymore. I've been doing this for a very, very long time and believe me, I have done some very strange presentations. Like in my mid-20s, I was doing presentations to women in their 40s and 50s about this stuff and we had some very interesting laughs and discussions.

So.

So there are in fact two things I would suggest. The first one is hyper hydration first thing in the day. So front loading your hydration in a day, getting super hydrated, but then stopping around 2 o' clock at the latest. Um, that Helps tremendously with hot flashes. Second thing is there's really good research that shows for women especially that strength training, so lifting weights, which I know well, anyway, lifting weights improves slow wave deep sleep, which is the restorative form of sleep in women. So if you can, if you're struggling with getting to sleep and staying asleep, then I think that that hyper hydration early in the day to help you with hot flashes and adding significant strength training two to three times a week to your fitness routine to improve your slow wave deep sleep would be two things that would make a big difference.

Amazing. A couple quick questions. Thank you for that menopause little tips there. I think that's great. These are just personal quick fire questions that often if we're interviewing athletes or different professionals, these give the insight to your personal preferences in life that professionally we often don't find out. If you're going to train, you're going to get kind of pumped up or maybe you're traveling, whatever it is. What's your favorite music?

So I actually have playlists built for before work, after work, during work and working out for your mind. Yeah, so I use, yeah, I've used music pretty extensively. So for example, coming home from work is like Dave Matthews, Jack Johnson. On my way to work it's stuff like Led Zeppelin or the who. During work it's stuff like concerts, usually classical and then during dinner I usually revert to 90s hip hop type stuff because it makes Judith, my wife happy. So helps us to avoid the K pop that my 11 year old daughter is into because that stuff is just awful. But anyway, so music is a huge part of our life and I'm pretty deliberate about it. And I've got a subscription to an app called Tidal if anyone wants to explore that. It just, you know, little bit higher quality music files and I love that one. So yeah, we're big into music and I would encourage everyone to create a pot, create a playlist for the things that you do to make your life better and create a soundtrack for your life. And that would be a very cool thing that we can all do to sort of up level life a tiny bit every single day.

And do you have a favorite book that you or type of book or book that you've read lately?

So I have two styles of reading. The first one is science fiction and fantasy fiction to unwind and decompress usually at the end of the day. So Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, just like whatever that happens to be just to completely disconnect from reality and try to calm myself down.

A lot of Harry Potter going on in this house.

Yeah, we've watched all of those movies a lot. And the other side is all of the sort of strategic growth stuff. So Ray Dalio's book Principles or Tim Ferriss books are all sort of really important and we'll go down the rabbit hole and all of that sort of personal optimization stuff that I read as well, that will typically happen first thing in the morning, like early, early, early, early. And then the fiction stuff tends to happen later in the day or the evening.

Nice, nice. And lastly, do you.

That's it.

Do you feel like you're living into your purpose?

All right, you froze, but that was perfect right at the end of that sentence. So, yeah, that's. That's pretty much what. What we're up to with regards to reading.

Amazing. Do you feel like you're living. Do you feel like you're living into your purpose?

Yeah, you know, it's an ongoing. It. I always struggle with that. Like, I always feel like it could be having more impact. I feel. I feel like I could be. Yeah, I don't know. It's sort of. I'm. I'm getting, Getting there. I think that I've done the best I can every single day. Like, I look back, I have no regrets on pretty much anything at any stage of life, but I do think that we're getting pretty close. I do feel like most days I'm on point with where. With where I am doing what I want to do. Everything can always be better. I don't really worry about that. It's process more than outcome these days. So, yeah, I feel. I feel pretty good most days. I'm smiling, so that's probably a good sign.

Good. Good.

Yeah.

And any last. Any words of advice for people up and coming in this industry or either in their own as an athlete or someone who's in the field of exercise.

Physiology, Uh, I think the number one piece of, you know, just general life advice that I would. I have been giving out a lot as I shift more into mentorship at this stage of my life, is stay really focused on you, what you love and not worry about what other else other people think. Don't worry about the likes on Instagram, don't look at, worry about the views on YouTube. Uh, just do you do what you love and if you do that, you're going to be pretty successful. So let's not stop worrying about external validation and start focusing on intrinsic motivation. I think that's a huge step for everyone in every field and unlocks tons of potential.

Amazing. Amazing. Well, thank you so much for being with us. Your knowledge, your wisdom, just being able to share that. I really, really appreciate this and so will our listeners so they can find you. You've got your website, I think, Dr.gregwells.com and your books, the ripple effect, the focus effect, super bodies, Rest, refocus, recharge and keep an eye out for the app which is continually knowing you. You'll be continually updating and adding to it. So amazing. Vivio the app. Thank you so much, Greg. Have a beautiful, beautiful day.

Carrie, thanks so much. It's great. Super fun. Thanks so much for having me on the show. Can't wait to do this again.

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