[00:00:00] I really hope this in my lifetime, we’re going to see an even greater evolution of how we talk about fitness. I think we can do it. I think we’re on our way and I think we can do it. But there’s been a lot of negative notions around fitness and health and medical care and all that, that like you do something and then you’re done or you do a diet to lose weight or you do a workout or whatever because that’s you have your worth tied up in.
I can say all this because I’ve been there. So. I – I don’t know what the easiest answer is, but I sometimes wonder if it would be easier for people to like be faced with mortality, which we are every day. But I’ll explain what I mean. I knew I probably wouldn’t live a long life if I didn’t radically change my health.
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Jesse: [00:01:36] Welcome to Smart Athlete Podcast. I’m your host Jesse Funk. My guest today has her degree in exercise science. She’s been featured in Experience Life magazine on Livestrong.com and many other publications. She’s the founder of Fit for Real Life and The Unbreakable Body, as well as the author of Becoming Unbreakable. You can find her at fitforreallife.com or on Instagram at Kate Galliett. Welcome to the show. Kate Galliett.
Kate: [00:02:03] Hi. It’s so nice to be here with you, Jesse.
Jesse: [00:02:06] Yeah. Thanks for joining me on this lovely Friday. Before we got going. So if you go on, you, the listeners, go on Kate’s Instagram, you don’t have to do it at this very moment. Or I guess you could pause and go check it out and come back. You’ll notice that she has a very fluffy, adorable, loving young dog. And apparently, just there was an episode last night that made her kind of lead up into the show hectic. So, Kate, tell us about the dog. Why? Why get a dog? Because everybody has different reasons. And then, I guess, give us some insight into the ups and downs of dealing with a puppy.
Kate: [00:02:48] Oh, yes. Well, I mean, I love all animals, of course, but we decided to get this adorable dog named Scout. Kind of like how people make a lot of choices because now is not a great time. So let’s do it.
Jesse: [00:03:04] What is it? It’s like, what is a good time?
Kate: [00:03:07] Oh, man. Anyways, I haven’t had a dog for a long time because I moved around a lot. Once I sold my – not sold, closed my gym, I didn’t end up selling it. I just closed the whole thing and took it with me. And then I moved away from Illinois to take my business online and kind of build my life where I felt most at home, which is in Utah, where I live now, as people can probably imagine, that comes with a lot of bouncing around until you find the perfect spot for yourself.
And so I was living in apartments and then house rentals and whatever, and it just didn’t seem like a good idea to have a dog amongst all of that, because I do know how limited my energy and resources actually are.
[00:03:47] And this is something I work with my clients on all the time. Like, do we have enough resources to do all these things that you want to do or do we need to modify your workouts a bit because you actually don’t have the energy to do all of this given the rest of your life? But now we’re settled in, in our house, and this is a house I’ll be staying in for a while, so that’s good.
Anyways, we got Scout. He’s a Bernese Mountain dog and he’s the fluffiest fluff meister I’ve ever met. And we joke that like, yes, we did all the research and reading and preparation like you probably have done for life changes that you are going through and still, nothing prepared us for the chaos that has ensued in the household over the last four months that we’ve had him.
[00:04:31] And for people who don’t know, Bernese Mountain dogs get really big, really fast. So he went from like a puppy to like 70lbs doesn’t fit on my lap anymore. And he’s only six months old. So anyways, he’s enough of a handful every day. Oh, and Bernese Mountain dogs love you. Like love you. They would like to be by your side literally forever. So I was saying before we started, I’m like, I’m going to have to go work out in the hall on the main hall area today because he’s not feeling so good and he’ll be like right on top of me as I do that.
[00:05:02] But I don’t know what happened to him. He got some sort of upset stomach yesterday and last night I was like, he did his last little bathroom break. And I was like, I have a feeling tonight it’s not going to be a great night for the bathroom side of things. And sure enough, like something just woke me up at five and I was like, I need to go check on him.
And we had I was out hosing my dog off at 5:20 this morning in the yard because he’s now too big for me to put him in the bathtub. So I’m literally standing out there just spraying off all the poop all over him. And now he’s just been relaxing with me this morning and I’ve been cleaning him up and cleaning the basement up and all of that. So it’s been a bit of a hectic morning, but I’m really glad to be here now.
Jesse: [00:05:44] The thing that I think about with like new adventures and for you, the listener, if you’re new or haven’t heard me mention other podcasts, at least at the time of this recording, by the time it comes out, maybe they’ll be here. But my wife and I are expecting a baby here in the next four weeks. So she was talking, was mentioning me, preparing for that. But the thing I think about with, I’ll say new adventures, regardless of what it is, whether it’s getting a dog or having a baby or starting a business or starting a new workout routine. You prepare.
[00:06:19] I was actually talking about this with a friend of mine the other day. There’s all you can get on YouTube. You can read the video. You can watch videos, you can read the articles, you can get books. You can do all the things and be prepared, which is great. But there’s a difference between doing and “knowing”. And I feel like at this point, people have asked me regarding the baby, are you ready? Are you ready? And I go, “Well, no, like nobody’s ready”. Right? And so I think I’ve kind of embraced the idea that I’m going to prepare. But also you can’t prepare. So just expect that you aren’t going to know everything.
Kate: [00:07:06] Yeah, absolutely. It’s that actually leads right in perfectly to how I coach people as well because I have this thing called the explorers mindset that I teach about in my book, and it’s to help someone shift their focus on what you’re doing every single day, because I think a lot of people come into the fitness aspect of whether it’s weight loss, injury management, recovery, sports performance, longevity, and they do research and they think, okay, I know what I’m doing, I’m ready. And then of course, you’re going to get smacked upside the head with tons of stuff that you didn’t know, that you didn’t expect, and that you don’t know what to do about. And you have to keep learning.
[00:07:44] And a lot of people get tripped up by that and get thrown off course, or they keep bashing their head into the same wall over and over again, thinking they’ll get a different result. And so with the explorer’s mindset, it helps someone go from this kind of like disconnected, not really sure what’s going on to being an explorer of your inner ecosystem, of your body and your outer ecosystem around you. And imagine I always start the explorers mindset like this. Imagine for your body or your baby or your dog or your business or whatever your that experience is, you arriving to a new place. And literally no one has been there before. There are no explorers that besides you coming to this place. That’s it. You are the first, the last and the only.
[00:08:27] So in this new place, it’s your job to figure out how to make this a hospitable place to live. You need to figure out what resources are here. That could be things you’ve already learned, you know, that could be who can help you. So in the case of a dog or a baby, can a neighbor come watch them for an hour while you go take a nap, you know, stuff like that. But then also looking at like what’s not here? So that could be knowledge I don’t have. I may need to hire a coach or an expert or listen to a family member who’s older, who’s wiser, who’s been through this you know. What can I make work here?
[00:09:00] So it’s not ideal, but what do I do about this? So in the case of an injury, no, it’s not ideal that you had your low back pain come back again, but what can you do with that? And one of the things you can do, and that’s sort of instances go OC There’s an opportunity for me to learn here. Let me start doing some experiments. Let me start collecting data and saying, okay, what happened right before the back pain? What have I been doing? What haven’t I been doing? Did anything else change? Is my health okay? Has my hormones changed? How is my sleep?
[00:09:30] So that’s all the inner and the outer stuff. By collecting that data, you then can actually do experiments instead of being like, Well, I don’t know why the baby’s crying or why my back hurts. You can start trying different things and we all intuitively can do this. But we’ve lost it as adults because, well, a number of reasons, but we’ve lost it and we’ve been guided into thinking we’re supposed to know or we can’t possibly know because it’s too complicated.
[00:09:54] In the case of bodies, it’s too complicated for you. You need to just farm your autonomy out to somebody else when really you can figure this out and you might have an expert you need to lean on, but they’re not more of an expert than you when it comes to your body. And you as parents, me as a dog parent, nobody’s more of an expert on the dog or the child than we are because we’re all the family unit. And so we know we can sense things. We just know when a baby needs something because it’s your baby.
[00:10:22] So with the explorer’s mindset, you can then explore, experiment, and then through those experiments you start curating your personal customized protocol of what works to quiet the baby down to make sure we don’t have diarrhea all over the place with the dog, to make sure back pain doesn’t come back, or that if it does, it’s less and it goes away quicker and we can resist it for longer. Explore, experiment, curate. Those are the three aspects of an explorer’s mindset that fit in perfectly with what you’re talking about here.
Jesse: [00:10:53] What is interesting is some people that will go through that process. So for some background, I used to a number of years ago, now I worked full time in the shoe store, helping runners and people with health problems and stuff get fit for shoes. And you would see people come in that have gone through this like. Exploration process of trying to find something to adapt to whatever malady is harming them or causing the issue. And they’ll have come up with some really creative solution that works.
[00:11:34] But maybe it’s not the best example of something they could solve their problem because they went through the exploration but then missed that step of that, as you mentioned, like leaning on an expert who maybe could have sped up the process and made things a little bit smoother. And I guess I’ll say more professional, but I mean, more honed probably is a better way of saying like. Like a good example of something I saw frequently was if somebody walked in and I saw that their laces were tied very, very tightly as they walked in the store. I knew immediately 90, 95% of the time they need narrow shoes.
[00:12:22] Their adaptation has been to tighten down regular size, like I’ll say, standard size, medium size, shoes, width. They tighten the laces down, which kind of works, keeps them on their feet. But if they had come in earlier, they wouldn’t have for years. Then you have this kind of maladaptive fix of wearing super tight laces. They can get into appropriate shoes. That is a very small example and not particularly painful for most people, but a little cumbersome. And then in your case, like, yeah, there’s so many more like —
Kate: [00:12:58] Example for sure, because that’s a really relatable one that people can go, “Oh yeah, of course, like get him a better shoe.” There, obviously it’s showing you right away. They’re not the right width shoe for their foot. And then it probably also informs you about other things about them that you probably know as an expert in shoes.
[00:13:14] It’s the same way with bodies, too. And since that’s my world, that’s what I speak to. Experts to me are like a professor or teacher in school. You’re supposed to have them for a period of time. They’re supposed to teach you some things. Then you’re supposed to take that knowledge and go on and the teacher doesn’t go with you. Sure, if you want to keep your teacher forever, you pay them forever to do that for you. But the point of a teacher is that you don’t keep them forever. They pass the knowledge on to you. People like myself who’ve been a coach for 21 years almost now and who’ve been through our own health challenges, we have seen it all. We have experienced it all.
[00:13:49] We have worked with thousands of people who’ve seen it all and experience also. We have this huge archive of like, “Oh, I know right away, best off I’ve seen you. Here’s where we might want to start first.” And that is the value of working with a professional in any realm therapy, teaching you a skill, seeing a good shoe person instead of just randomly buying shoes because you think they’re pretty, you know, hiring a fitness coach.
[00:14:13] These are important things that can really, as you said, accelerate and kind of smooth out the process so that you still are the autonomous one who gets to decide everything because you’re the expert here. And you get to say, that doesn’t quite jive with what I’m feeling in my heart. So I’m going to actually kind of pivot a little bit or think about that a little bit more or use it in a slightly different way, but by capitalizing on someone else’s expertize that they are happy to share with you as a teacher, you get a lot further, a lot faster.
Jesse: [00:14:44] It — I want to ask you about this. Some of the scene you kind of touch on, it seems like a mainstay of the mindset that you kind of say deal with that. That’s not necessarily the word I want, but it’s not coming to me. And the idea about getting older and this just just the way things are and I think that’s where you get what I believe are often maladaptive behaviors.
[00:15:13] We’re just like. You know, I think you speak to this office like, oh, my back hurts or just like I PC or not. It reminds me of a Louis C.K. special where he talks about going to the doctor and, like, having problems with his ankle. And he’s like in his forties at that time. And he’s asking the doctor, like, “What do I do about this?” And the joke is the doctor’s like, “Well, that’s just you and your shitty ankle now.” Like, that’s just, just just how it is. And you just go on with life and you just got this terrible ankle forever now, which if you have a degenerative disease, like, I can see that. But it seems like most soft tissue injuries shouldn’t be treated in that manner. Am I on the right path here?
Kate: [00:16:01] Yeah, absolutely. It’s so I didn’t wear the shirt today, but I have a shirt that I sell called it says “Too old is a myth” on the front because too many people are like, “Oh, I’m too old for that now.” And I’m like, That is the most limiting, dumb belief I’ve ever heard in my life, because only you are deciding that you’re too old. I play in a women’s golf league now. My neighbor, she’s 76, she wrote me into it and it’s fun. My partner this week was 81. A woman in the group last week is 93. And you think she’s 70 – I mean, she walks fine, she can talk. She likes she’s not she doesn’t seem like a 90 something year old.
[00:16:36] So we’re the only ones who are limiting ourselves with this narrative that you could be too old. And so in my book, I talk about this as well. This notion that it’s too late for you is absurd because biologically the only time it is too late is when you’re dead. Here’s why our bodies operate on a principle called the signal response principle. What that says, that principle says, is that our bodies are always responding to the signals they receive. Thus, if you can tune into the response of low back pain or fatigue or a neck soreness up in the top of your head or knee pain when you go down stairs. If you can tune into those responses from your body, use your explorer’s mindset to go.
[00:17:18] That’s trying to tell me something, because pain’s always trying to tell you something. Anything you’re feeling is trying to tell you something. What could that be about? What am I doing? Then immediately you start going on the journey of trying to figure out what signal is causing that or contributing to that, or could be influencing that. Could it be the chair I sit in? Could it be the fact that I don’t strengthen my torso? Could it be that I have breathing issues? Could it be that I’m sleeping poorly on a bad pillow?
[00:17:44] These are all things that you can then experiment on to figure out what change in the signal you can make to then get a different response. Because when you do change the signals, you do get a different response. Most people, though, just don’t spend enough time being diligent, working that process to see the change. I actually had a stupid post recently on Instagram. I think they’re all dumb because it’s just whatever. I’m just sharing what I am you know.
[00:18:08] But I just was making the point about the signal response principle. I have been working with my coach on Airway Health, so first we were working on lungs, diaphragm, pelvic area, rib cage. Now we’re up here working on all the airway up here. And if you want to go down a rabbit hole, start looking at how crazy and complex this whole area is. It’s fascinating. Anyways, so he was giving me exercises to help improve my tongue position and my jaw position and just things like that.
[00:18:38] I did those every day. They took 10 minutes, six weeks later, and he said, “Take a photo of your face just so we can see if anything changes on the symmetry of your face as we do this”, because we’re strengthening muscles, changing how joints function, changing the tongue position. Sure enough, six weeks later my face looked totally different and I have that on Instagram if anybody wants to see it. And of course, everybody was like, “Oh my God, what did you do to your face? I want to do that, too.” I get it. Everybody wants to like do stuff to their face.
[00:19:06] I was like, I liked my face before. It was just fine. It just looks different now. But this proves the point. Your body’s always responding. So if you change the signal by starting an exercise routine or a gratitude practice or prayer practice or not drinking caffeine anymore or drinking more caffeine, your body will respond. And if you can just keep that front and center and be diligent about it, that means it’s never too late because your cells will continue to turn over until the day you die. What signals are you sending those cells? Well, that’s up to you, and that’s going to determine how they respond. And in a nutshell, that’s where it’s never too late or you’re not too old for any of this stuff.
Jesse: [00:19:47] Sometimes when people talk about begin that idea of like, oh, it’s, it just hurts like the Lucy Kay example of just my shitty ankle now or whatever. Like, you know, it’s just the way it, it, it reminds me there’s this the I’m sure you’ve heard this the analogy about the dog that’s lying on a nail and it hurts, but not enough to move. So he just keeps lying in the same spot every day. It’s like. Sometimes I wonder. Why people will tolerate the nail. Like, clearly, it’s irritating. It’s just not irritating enough to induce change.
[00:20:29] And I guess I wonder because. I go gambol like two feet over there’s no nails. Like, you don’t have to go that far to get rid of that irritation. Like, if it’s a bigger irritation, like, in my case, I broke my collarbone a couple of years ago. I had that surgery. It took some time to rehab. Like, that’s a it’s a little bit bigger than a nail, right?
But if it was just like, you know, my shoulders are stiff when I swim or something, like, I don’t have to just have to be like, Oh, I just have stiff shoulders. Like, there’s probably something I can do. Maybe I have weakness or maybe I can increase my flexibility, or there’s something I can do to my routine. I just. I guess I have a hard time. Maybe because I’m so used to the growth mindset. Not that I’m an angel for clarification sake. Not perfect by any means. But I don’t understand why people tolerate the nail for so long that they’re just lying on.
Kate: [00:21:33] I mean, it’s a complex compendium of reasons which will be different for each person. And I want to start by saying you’re not better or worse than anybody else if you tolerate more or less one way or the other. But. Like like I mean, this is true for marketing. This is why people market to pain points.
Jesse: [00:21:54] Yes.
Kate: [00:21:54] More at the pleasure points. So those two who are being marketed to, which is all of us people are out there marketing to your biggest fear, your biggest worry, and your biggest struggle way more than their marketing to like your ultimate dream of like happiness in life.
Jesse: [00:22:08] So I seem to respond to more negative things and we remember the more negative things than we do the positive things.
Kate: [00:22:13] Exactly. So that’s. That’s part of it, that there’s a lot of messaging out there that like. Pain is normal and common and that supports the marketing, then that I have a solution for your pain and your problems. The problem with that is that. That still sells the solution to someone’s pain as a quick fix thing, you just check the box, you paid the money, whatever you buy, the device, you do the whatever, and then it’s over. But that’s not how bodies work.
[00:22:48] Now, on the other end of the same spectrum, there’s another thing happening because not everybody is the same. Some are like they’re too worried, they’re too afraid. They don’t want to get going. Others are like to shut down. They’re not interested. There’s some other things going on. But at that other end of the spectrum is this silly notion that you have to go balls to the wall to make any kind of change. You have to like beat your low back into submission to get it to stop hurting.
Jesse: [00:23:14] I call that like the American mindset.
Kate: [00:23:17] It’s absurd. And like, that’s not true either. And the problem is then there’s a million problems I’ve just listed. So some are like, Oh, I want the quick fix. Others are like, I will go bonkers doing way more than is necessary. And often the human condition is to swing from one end of the pendulum to the other, and it takes a long time to find the middle way in Daoism, the happy medium where you do just enough to make change. You do just enough to catch it early before it becomes a big problem. And my goal in life is to show people that it doesn’t take that much of a signal to get the response you want.
[00:23:59] Provided the signal you’re sending is concise and pointed and directed at exactly what you’re trying to change. So if you’re trying to your point, if you’re trying to change how your shoe feels by tying the laces tighter, that’s the roundabout way to do it. The direct way to get the change that you want and have a better fitting shoe is to get a different shoe that is correctly narrow for or wide, I guess, for your foot. This is true for bodies as well.
[00:24:23] And that’s why with my programs, often people are like, That’s all I have to do. I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m not saying my workout programs are like a walk in the park, but they’re not they’re not going to beat you into submission ever, because they are directed exercises and lifestyle experiments and things that you can do that I know when we do these right, we are going to get right to the heart of the matter and we’re going to start seeing some change pretty quickly.
Jesse: [00:24:49] I think one thing that’s hard for people to grasp, even though I’m engaged in the process, I think it’s hard for people to understand that there is no end state. And by that I mean that, like, if you don’t continue to make those signal inputs or work on your back, like we’re either in a state of growth or in a state of decay like we, there is no such thing. We’ll put an asterisk next to that as like equilibrium*. And along it’s it’s up or down, basically.
[00:25:29] And, you know, we can I don’t know I don’t know how many people that were collegiate athletes, very good collegiate athletes or even professionals. Top of their game, and then they stop and then they get fat because they’re no longer putting in the hours. And then when often is the case with runners especially continue to eat like they are and then it’s just way more calories in and calories out. But I think the tendency towards entropy or chaos basically is difficult for us to grasp.
[00:26:13] They’re like if you if you think about the actual reality of this, like I think you and I are fine with this, we kind of come to peace with this. But like the idea of I have to keep doing this difficult thing for the rest of my life. Like, that’s a that’s a long time, right? Some people are like, I’m having trouble doing 30 minutes today. How am I going to do it for the rest of my life? Obviously, you don’t focus on trying to do the rest of your life all at once. You just do it a day at a time.
Kate: [00:26:45] Yeah.
Jesse: [00:26:46] But. I think that concept is hard to grasp because it’s like I don’t know how many people I’ve talked to, professionals that do rehab and do kind of work like you do. It’s like people will get through the rehab. Like, I feel great and then they’ll stop and then they’re injured again within six months. They got to that point where they feel like I’m fixed. I no longer need to pay attention to it.
Kate: [00:27:14] Yeah, it’s I really hope this in my lifetime, we’re going to see an even greater evolution of how we talk about fitness. I think we can do it. I think we’re on our way and I think we can do it. But there’s been a lot of negative notions around fitness and health and medical care and all that, that like you do something and then you’re done or you do a diet to lose weight or you do a workout or whatever because that’s you have your worth tied up in it.
[00:27:39] I can say all this because I’ve been there. So. I. I don’t know what the easiest answer is, but I sometimes wonder if it would be easier for people to like. Be faced with mortality, which we are every day. But I’ll explain what I mean. I knew I probably wouldn’t live a long life if I didn’t radically change my health. And my relationship to food and exercise. That was when I was 20. I knew I was like the man who helped me, Dr. Turner. I mean, I owe him my life. And so.
[00:28:17] That was a very stark period of time for me where I had to say I. I don’t know what’s driving me, but I know I want to live. That’s the only thing I’ve got at this point. And I will do whatever it takes. And it was so hard. It was so hard for so many years because I had to detox my body. I had to go on very particular diets, not because they were weight loss diets or like a fad detox.
[00:28:43] But I was doing serious overhaul down to the cellular level of like every organ in my body, every cell in my body, my hypothalamus, pituitary adrenal axis, like everything had to change. That sort of radical change requires radical effort that when I say it’s not that hard, I mean sometimes in the beginning it’s going to suck and it’s going to be super hard.
[00:29:06] But even in the first few things that I was doing with him, because I told him I don’t have the money or time or energy to do all the things yet. And we started with like increasing my stomach acid so that I had the right amount of stomach acid to digest food. And it was like a simple digestive enzyme I took so I could start with that. And I started to see progress. But then as we got into that, we were like, “Oh, there’s some deep healing that has to happen here.” And I was doing the whole kit and caboodle, but now it’s not that hard anymore and I can maintain that.
[00:29:32] But having gone through that. There’s no way I would eat in a way that makes me unwell or live in a way that makes me unwell or use personal care products in a way that makes me unwell. Anything that is influencing my health and wellbeing, it’s just a non-negotiable. It’s not even a consideration. It’s just, this is how I live. And I sometimes wonder, like, man, would it be easier for more people to feel like they can do this forever if they were facing mortality like that? Like lots of people do, and there’s lots of success stories out there that are like that.
[00:30:06] I wish that wasn’t the case, but it has that difficulty and struggle made it so it’s not even a question anymore. When I have to go through this now, I don’t want my my clients that I work with to be like I’m at death’s door, so I need you and we got to do this. I would much rather they catch that hint from the body earlier. It’s like my back keeps being a problem. I should probably talk to somebody about this before they get to the point of being like debilitated in bed for weeks on end because they didn’t listen to their body.
[00:30:38] So I don’t I wish wouldn’t wish that on other people. But I think sometimes we have to get to the point where we can’t take being this way anymore. And we have had a stark realization that, like, the future looks bad and I can do something to change that.
Jesse: [00:30:54] I’ve actually talked about this with a couple other guests over the years. The idea of death as a motivator. And I talk about it because, as a child, you have very little great perspective of times and stuff. But I grew up with a father that was older than my friend’s father and I feel like he’s old and he won’t be around as long as like other kids, dad. So I need to be motivated and do all of these things and just very like, almost like overly prescient. Presence in my mind.
[00:31:32] Not that he impressed that on me in any way, but just for some reason that got in my head and I felt like it motivated me a lot. And I think there’s something to that. If you look at, say, on the extreme end, people that have like a near-death experience or people that do become very ill and then recover and they have this kind of. Often, unfortunately, a brief period of time where they go like, I’m going to make all the changes and do all the things and then they like we talked about before.
[00:32:11] Kind of do it for a little bit. It gets “fixed”, and then go back to the same way that they’ve been doing things. So I definitely think there’s something to the idea of mortality, as a motivator, like realizing our finite existence, although it is hard to grapple with and scary at the same time.
Kate: [00:32:35] Absolutely. And I think one of the messages I would like to see us evolve into in the fitness industry and wellness and health care and all of that, is that this is a dance. So like sometimes it’s going one direction, sometimes it’s going another direction. Your body is going to be telling you things all the time and you can ebb and flow with that. We don’t have an FLO in the health and fitness world anywhere near as much as we should.
[00:32:57] And if we could, I talk about this like you stay on the path when you’re going like this, “Oh, works crazy this week or we have a new baby”. Training is going to take a bit of a backseat. I’m going to do what I can. I’m going to sit down between my sets. I actually have a client right now going through some similar things to what you’re about to go through with lack of sleep and like workouts now are not intense. They’re like, do a set of exercise, go sit down for 2 minutes and read a book. No going on your phone, no watching TV, nothing stimulating, just calming. Then go to another set. And we call it a work in which I learned that term from Paul Chatman a year ago. But that allows that person to stay on the path even though they’re not doing as much work and their body is still responding.
[00:33:39] It keeps it from falling completely off the cliff and then having to climb back up again. So I think if we can teach more people how to dance with their bodies, responses, with fitness, with sleep, with the things that you’re focused on, you’re not going to win by doing the most things and you’re not going to win by doing the most things the hardest and the most intense.
[00:34:03] But to go on the journey of figuring out how do I let go of the intensity? If I’m a little too intense with things, I’m a little too obsessive with my running. I know that. How do I let go of the rigidness I have with my diet or the lack of rigidness I have with my diet? How do I adjust when I know I’m not getting good sleep and I’m stressed to the max? Instead of just saying “Let’s torpedo the whole thing and drink every night and not do our workout” How can I, how can I keep moving in this ecosystem that I am currently in? I would love to see more people feel like that and be able to navigate life like that.
Jesse: [00:34:39] It’s several, several thoughts here. So if I could string them all together, turn with the pendulum earlier, swing it from one direction to the other. It’s that like all or nothing mentality. I’m definitely subject to this at times as well, but like. The idea of ebbing and flowing, but staying on the path reminds me of a suggestion I saw on Reddit.
[00:35:03] Sorry to whoever posted this because I don’t. I have no idea what the username was. So I guess that’s the anonymity of Reddit. But they had mentioned. Somebody was asking about how do I get started going to the gym? How do I get started and be able to stay consistent with it?
[00:35:23] And I really liked their suggestion of like, don’t go to the gym and try to just like hit every weight machine you can and like as you go balls to the walls, just all just crazy with that, like, super hustle mentality that we like to market here in the US. Don’t do that. Instead. Just go to the gym and maybe walk on the treadmill for five or 10 minutes and just do that for a week or two weeks. Just get in the habit of going to the gym. Don’t worry about doing all the things yet.
[00:36:03] All you need to do in the beginning is build up the habit of going. So it’s like breaking it down even further into understanding that, okay, yeah, you have a fitness goal. That’s great. It’s going to move you hopefully in a healthy direction. But there’s also another behavior that needs to be changed within that. And that’s the habit of actually getting out of the house and getting to the gym. And that’s the foundation of the fitness goal.
[00:36:35] But we like we forget about that or ignore it or don’t realize that it’s even there because we’re so focused on like, ‘Oh, I need to I need to do my five minute abs to have to have a six pack” or whatever, like silver bullet thing we’re focused on at the moment. I really like that suggestion of just like, just go. Don’t try to do a bunch of stuff.
Kate: [00:36:58] Yeah. Bj Fogg says he’s a habit researcher, very well known in the habit space that a lot of good research on how do we keep good habits and what’s all about willpower. And he always says, make the bar so low, you can step over it. Nobody wants to do that, though, because everybody wants to, like, feel the sense of achievement. And that is a bit more speaking to the sense that we are addicted to dopamine and we feel accomplished when we’ve worked really hard and when we’ve done a bunch of things.
[00:37:27] But like you cannot sustain any sort of health and wellness practice or life practice on dopamine. Try. It is I mean, your brain will break trying to live off of dopamine so. I try to get people to realize that the journey is really fun, but it’s a lot of routine day-to-day stuff done for a really, really long time. And it’s not going to feel so intense all the time and it’s not supposed to.
[00:38:01] You are doing more by going to the treadmill 5 minutes for a week or two than you would be if you hit the gym super hard this week. And by next week you’re already too sore and not feeling good and you’re too tired because people forget to. When you exert a ton of energy or dopamine, it’s going to take at least that much and more to get the same hit in the future. But also you have to recover from that energy exhaustion, and that includes willpower. When we burn through willpower and energy and mental focus, we are flattened by that.
[00:38:29] Just think of if you’ve had to focus with kids or work or family members that are a struggle at a family, get together, you’re tired after that. Mentally, you’re just mentally tired from that. That’s what you’re doing when you do what this guy was saying not to do, like go do all the things to the gym, which so many people do. So I like that advice as well. I think more people would do better if they just made the bar so low they could step over it.
Jesse: [00:38:53] That’s that’s a really good phrase. And another because I spend too much time on Reddit. It’s kind of my downtime pastime. Another thing I mentioned is another podcast. I like the idea this has been passed a number of times that if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing poorly. Again trying to combat that all or nothing mentality where it’s like maybe you’re like, I’m really going to get into running and I want to run an Ultra. It’s like. Yeah. But if it’s worth doing and you haven’t done it before, maybe like like 5K school like or even if a 5Ks too much like, hey, maybe you can, like, just run for a minute and then walk for 5 minutes and then run for another minute. Just something other than, “Hey, let’s just stay at home and forget it.”
Kate: [00:39:43] Right, exactly like it. Your body’s always responding, so every signal counts. And I tell my clients that, “Hey, if you have an off week and you only do two sets of stuff instead of three, or you don’t do a workout one day so that you can do it the other day like it still counts” and when speaking of runners, when I teach my clients about zone 2 cardio to help them with their mitochondrial fitness and all of that, “I’m like, yes, the science says longer is better”.
[00:40:10] But if 25 minutes just cooks you out and mentally taxes you, why are we shooting for longer than 25 minutes? 25 minutes still counts for your tendons, for your tissues, for your cardiovascular. It’s still counts. So stop trying to think that it doesn’t count unless I did 45 minutes or an hour or 90 minutes because our body doesn’t adapt that way anyways, and you’re selling yourself short and missing a lot of opportunities to send good signals to your body. If you’re like, I only care if it was an ultra marathon. Besides too, people want to get fit really fast, right? Which I get. And you’re like, I want it now. I’ve decided I want it too. I want it now.
[00:40:46] Here’s what I always say to that. Your body will adapt in the time that it takes to adapt, especially with consistent effort from you. It will happen in an appropriate and reasonable time. And if that time is too long for you, I don’t comprehend what that means because too long is when you’re dead. The only time you run out of time is when you’re dead, in which point you will not care because you won’t be here anymore.
[00:41:08] So keep at it. If you have an ultra marathon goal now and you’re 40 and you’re like, Would you be disappointed if you accomplished it by the time you’re 65? Or would you be like, “Hell yeah, I stuck with this goal for a really long time and I finally did it.” I feel like most people would be the latter, but they tend to act like the former. If I don’t get it right now, I don’t want to do it at all.
Jesse: [00:41:31] Again I think it comes back a little bit to just that the. The gravity of thinking, Oh, it’s going to take so long because there’s like a video I did that people asking about like, “Oh, can you do a marathon with a couple of months of training?” It’s like some people can do it and get away with it, but I wouldn’t suggest it because there’s so many things that can go wrong for so many people, the amount of stress you’re putting on your body. Like, I’m kind of like couch to marathon. Have people done it? Yes. Should they do it? I think that’s a resounding no. It’s like you definitely some people.
[00:42:11] Some people can many people would break even I would break. And I’ve been running for 20 years. I think I could do it, but it wouldn’t be pretty at the end. It’s just like talking about adaptations. It takes as long as it takes. And you’re talking about like the 25 minutes if that taxes you. I think it’s like, meet yourself where you are. Yeah. You want to be able to go for 45 minutes, but before you can go for 45 minutes, you need to be able to go for 25 minutes and still feel good at the end.
[00:42:48] So don’t like beat yourself up because I’m not already ready to run the ultramarathon or run for 25 minutes or run for 2 minutes. Because there are people that. A minute or 2 minutes is taxing. That’s okay. Yeah. Just say “Hey!”, like we’re running because that’s kind of my background in endurance sports. “If you can run for a minute, that’s great. You know, maybe tomorrow or the next day, whatever your schedule is, you try running for a minute and a half.” Which sounds stupid because you’re like, it’s only 30 seconds, but it adds up —
Kate: [00:43:26] It sure does.
Jesse: [00:43:27] Over time. The ability to focus on now and trust the process, I think is a much underutilized strategy and very hard for people to grasp.
Kate: [00:43:43] I was just going to say that this whole thing that you’re talking about comes back to trusting your body and trusting yourself. And I think that is sorely lacking for a lot of people. It was lacking for me as well. So you’re not alone if that’s hitting, right?
Jesse: [00:43:57] I’m not just preaching like I’ve been through this. I have to redo these things. All that is like because it is a process and you, your brain still have these tendencies where we go, I just want a quick fix and you just like slow down so it happens to the best of us if you’re listening.
Kate: [00:44:14] The more you practice trust in your body, the more you trust your body.
Jesse: [00:44:18] Right, right. Kate, as we’re winding down on time, I’ll ask you the question I’m asking everybody this year, which since you’ve listened to a couple, should you probably already know. But I ask a question, a single question to every guest for an entire year. This year’s question is, how do you celebrate your wins?
Kate: [00:44:42] That’s a really good question. What have I done lately? Well, when I finished writing my book, that was a huge win because it was two years of writing. I’m just like, Oh my gosh, just I’ve never dedicated myself to a project like that. Before I joined a community, I’d wanted to join for a gardening group where you can learn all about gardening and the teacher helps you become a master gardener, or at least a better gardener. He’s a master. I’m trying to get to his level someday.
[00:45:09] And that was that was the big gift. And I held that. That was an important thing to hold in my mind because I was like, “Oh, my God, this is never-ending” like that. And so, you know, it’s a it’s an investment in myself and it’ll be a couple hundred bucks for the year to be in the group. And so I thought, well, that would be a worthy investment. So I would say at this point, like experiences or things that would add value to my life. My next one I’d like to do for another project I’m doing is painting.
[00:45:36] I want to try painting. I’m probably terrible at it, but I always see people paint. I’m like, “Wow, that’s such a cool talent. I would love to try that sometime.” So that’ll probably be the next one that I use for a project that I’m working on. So I would say experiences.
Jesse: [00:45:48] Cool. Kate where can people find you if they want to get in touch, see what you’re up to, get some advice, any of that kind of stuff?
Kate: [00:45:55] Well, I think if the most comprehensive place to find me is at fitforreallife.com or theunbreakablebody.com. Because that’s where you’ll find links to everything else. But if you’re a social media fan, I am on Instagram @Kate Galliett and I’m also on YouTube and all the other variety of places. I’m the best at updating YouTube and Instagram because that’s just kind of where I lean. But there are so many of these things to keep up with these days.
Jesse: [00:46:19] Yeah. Kate, thanks for hanging out with me today.
Kate: [00:46:22] Thank you, Jesse.