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Are your long runs and cardio sessions actually making fat loss harder? Could walking be more effective for your physique and longevity?

I bring on former pro triathlete and Olympic coach Brad Kearns to challenge the conventional wisdom around running and fat loss. Brad explains why chronic cardio may sabotage your metabolism, increase your appetite, and even make you lazier.

Brad Kearns is a two-time US national champion and a former #3 world-ranked professional triathlete. He is the co-author of Born to Walk with Mark Sisson. Brad is a coach, researcher, and speaker focused on longevity, fat loss, and performance.

Today, you’ll learn all about:

02:12 – Why running is the second most dangerous sport after football
06:19 – The genetic flaw in the argument that humans are "Born to Run"
09:34 – How chronic cardio affects metabolism and fat loss
14:27 – Why most calorie burn calculations are totally inaccurate
20:56 – Walking is anabolic, running is catabolic—here’s why
30:02 – The best way to sprint for fat loss (without burnout)
39:09 – Why endurance runners tend to be lazier throughout the day
45:46 – The fat max heart rate and why most people run too fast
55:36 – How to run without destroying your metabolism or joints
1:04:13 – Outro

Episode resources:

• Free bonuses when you buy the book: borntowalkbook.com

• The B.rad Podcast

• Website: bradkearns.com 

Walking vs. Running for Fat Loss and Longevity

If you’ve been logging miles on the treadmill or pounding the pavement in hopes of burning fat, but the results just aren’t there, it’s time to rethink your strategy. In this episode of Wits & Weights, former pro triathlete and Olympic coach Brad Kearns shares why chronic cardio might be holding you back and how a simple shift to more walking (and less running) could improve fat loss, recovery, and longevity.

Why Running Isn’t the Fat Loss Hack You Think It Is

For decades, running has been sold as the ultimate way to get lean. But the science tells a different story:

• Running increases appetite and calorie compensation – More miles often lead to more eating, negating the calorie burn.

• It’s a catabolic activity – Over time, excessive endurance training can break down muscle tissue instead of preserving it.

• Chronic stress from running raises cortisol levels – Elevated cortisol can lead to increased visceral fat storage, making fat loss harder.

• High injury rates – Around 50% of regular runners get injured every year, making it one of the riskiest sports for long-term health.

Yes, running can be a fantastic form of movement if done properly and in moderation. But for many people, it’s more of a fat loss roadblock than a solution.

Walking: The Underrated Fat Loss and Longevity Secret

Unlike running, walking is a low-stress, high-reward movement pattern that aligns with our genetic blueprint. Here’s why walking should be your go-to for fat loss and overall health:

• Minimally stressful and anabolic – Unlike running, walking doesn’t break down muscle tissue. In fact, it can support muscle retention when paired with strength training.

• Keeps cortisol in check – Because walking is low-intensity, it promotes fat burning without excessive stress.

• No recovery cost – You can walk for hours a day without wrecking your body, unlike long-distance running.

• Supports cardiovascular health – Walking at a brisk pace provides many of the heart-health benefits of running without the downsides.

The Fat Max Heart Rate: The Key to Effective Movement

One of the biggest takeaways from Brad’s research is understanding the Fat Max Heart Rate—the intensity level where your body burns the most fat per minute.

A simple formula to estimate your Fat Max Heart Rate:
180 minus your age

For example, if you’re 40 years old, your Fat Max HR would be 140 beats per minute (BPM). Going beyond this threshold shifts your body from primarily burning fat to burning carbohydrates, increasing fatigue and stress hormone production.

Most people hit their Fat Max HR with brisk walking, not running. That’s why slow, steady movement is often a better long-term strategy for body composition and overall health.

Sprinting: The Missing Piece of the Puzzle

If you love running but want to make it more effective, sprinting is the way to go. Sprinting is powerful, explosive, and delivers benefits that long-distance running never will:

• Triggers massive fat loss, especially visceral fat.

• Boosts testosterone and growth hormone, making it one of the best anti-aging activities.

• Improves athletic performance and enhances overall movement efficiency.

• Doesn’t lead to the same metabolic slowdown seen with chronic endurance training.

How to Sprint for Maximum Benefit

Brad recommends a quality-over-quantity approach to sprinting:

• 4–8 sprints per session

• 10–20 seconds per sprint

• At least a 6:1 rest ratio (e.g., if you sprint for 10 seconds, rest for at least 60 seconds before the next one)

Unlike running, sprinting is about short, explosive bursts with full recovery. You’ll get stronger, leaner, and more athletic—without the wear and tear of endurance running.

Making Walking a Part of Your Daily Life

The key to making walking effective is consistency. It’s not about tracking every step—it’s about integrating movement naturally into your lifestyle:

• Walk after meals to help with digestion and blood sugar control.

• Take walking breaks at work instead of sitting all day.

• Use a dog walk or a podcast (like Wits & Weights!) as motivation to get moving.

• Replace short drives with walks whenever possible.

Brad makes a great point—walking isn’t just exercise, it’s a biological necessity, much like sleep. When we move more, we function better. Simple as that.

The Bottom Line

If fat loss and longevity are your goals, walking and sprinting should be at the core of your routine—not chronic, steady-state running. While running has its place, most people overdo it and end up harming their metabolism, increasing stress, and slowing fat loss.

Instead, prioritize:
✅ Daily walking (as much as possible)
✅ Strength training (to preserve muscle and metabolism)
✅ Sprinting (for maximum fat loss and longevity benefits)

By shifting your mindset from “running for fat loss” to “walking for health and sprinting for performance,” you’ll burn more fat, stay injury-free, and improve your overall longevity.

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Transcript

Philip Pape: 0:01

If you've been hitting long runs and cardio sessions, hoping to get leaner, but you aren't seeing the fat loss results you want, this episode is definitely for you. Former pro triathlete and Olympic coach, Brad Kearns, reveals how chronic cardio may be sabotaging your metabolism and making fat loss harder. You'll discover why walking could give you far better results than running. Learn about how running impacts your appetite and hormones, and understand exactly how to optimize your movement for both physique and longevity. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that helps you build a strong, healthy physique using evidence, engineering and efficiency.

Philip Pape: 0:46

I'm your host, Philip Pape, and today we're challenging conventional wisdom about cardio and fat loss with Brad Kearns. Brad is a researcher, coach, former two-time US national champion, number three world-ranked professional triathlete. He placed second in last year's USA Masters National Championships in the 55 to 59 high jump. His new book, Born to Walk with Mark Sisson, exposes the science behind why extensive walking, not running, aligns with our genetic blueprint for optimal health. Today, you'll learn the metabolic reasons running can make fat loss harder, how it might make you lazier and tips for a more effective approach to cardio for fat loss. Brad, thank you so much. Welcome to the show.

Brad Kearns: 1:26

Hey, philip, I'm glad to be on. Great intro there. Thanks for spending the time and, yeah, we're going to roll up our sleeves and get into it, because we got some issues to discuss in the fitness world and it's been decades now of this programming message, of struggling and suffering your way to getting fit, that this is the path and it's time to unwind it, because so many well-meaning people have, you know, laced up their running shoes and, in the case of what we focus on in the book, but also, you know, devoted gym rats who are going in and taking a bunch of classes or immersed into the extreme CrossFit community and, by and large, following an inappropriate protocol that leads to breakdown, burnout, illness and injury and especially, failed efforts at reducing excess body fat and all kinds of other fallout, where the body is trained inappropriately and the results don't happen.

Philip Pape: 2:19

So let's go right for the jugular, because you took us there. You mentioned some trigger words for people, I'm sure including CrossFitfit, which I did for like eight years before I switched the way that I trained. What's wrong with running brad like what is wrong with it?

Brad Kearns: 2:31

uh, well, depends who you are, and it's really a wonderful outlet for people who are highly trained and well adapted and have that baseline physical fitness and musculoskeletal resiliency to enjoy endurance training. But it can easily lead to problems when you are not well adapted and you're coming from sedentary lifestyle patterns and then lacing up the shoes and heading down the road. So we need to look at running as a very dangerous, high risk sport because of the aforementioned fallout that I talked about. I talked to earnest high school kids who are competitive runners and then they get injured and their parent seeks me out to talk about my experience as a former elite level high school and college runner and pro triathlete and I say you know, you understand, like it's probably the second most dangerous sport on the high school docket besides tackle football. And it's this pounding and this prevailing approach where the obsession with repeatedly accumulating lots of miles day after day in the interest of getting fit for these ridiculous events that we glorify, like the 26.2 mile marathon. So it's inherently too stressful for the body and for most participants to gain any benefit from.

Brad Kearns: 3:53

Therefore, we have that tongue and cheek title of the book. We call it Born to Walk and it's a little bit of a take on the 2009 bestselling book called Born to Run, which glorified the amazing genetic attributes of the human for endurance. So we are indeed built for occasional magnificent feats of endurance as we are hunting down our prey on the savannah and evolving to the top of the food chain because we are able to access the big game and the nutrient-rich foods, and so that's part of our evolutionary biology that we are, for example, bipedal, so we are much better runners than a four-legged creature, and we have sweat mechanisms so we can persist and do endurance achievements in the heat where other animals might become overheated. We have an Achilles tendon, which primatologist Bill Sellers contends is quote the primary evolutionary adaptation that made human beings who they are, because our ape cousins, who don't have Achilles tendons if you go to the zoo and watch a chimpanzee decide to sprint across his area. He's running with this strange flat-footed style like a gorilla, and they're not well adapted for running any distance.

Brad Kearns: 5:04

And so we take this story and this message and then we have a very flawed misinterpretation and misappropriation to conclude that we are going to benefit from running long distances on the regular. So what happens when we get into overly stressful workout patterns and I'll define exactly how you can determine whether you're in an overly stressed pattern or not. But when we overstress ourselves with regular workouts that are slightly to significantly too difficult, that's when we incur these overuse injuries at an amazing rate. The stats on the running community are absolutely shocking and embarrassing. Yale University School of Medicine contends that 50% of all regular runners are injured every year and that 25% of all devoted runners are injured at any given time.

Philip Pape: 6:02

Yeah, I was going to get into that stat, so I'm glad you led with that, because two major things you brought up. One is the injury rate. I know soccer is another one that's way up there on the injury rate, which involves a lot of running but of course involves people crashing each other without equipment on, and I know lifting weights is at the bottom, if not the bottom lowest injury on the list, just so people are aware of that. You also mentioned the genetic or ancestral factor. Let's just talk about that for a second, because you made a great argument that it is a, not a red herring. What's the logical flaw when people say, well, if our ancestors did this one thing, then it extrapolates to everything else, which we do, for food too, let's admit it, yeah.

Brad Kearns: 6:38

Yeah. And then you, you lead with sentences like wouldn't you think that blank, blank, blank, lead with sentences like, wouldn't you think that blank, blank, blank? And I'm like, well, maybe not, but since you loaded me up, I guess I have to think that way, yeah, so I guess it's out of context. Evolutionary biology insight. So indeed, if we went and looked at the Hadza in Tanzania one of the last remaining hunter-gatherer populations on earth they cover between three and nine miles per day in the course of their daily business gathering or out on persistence hunts. And so the human has long been engaged in frequent everyday movement, until only actually recent times, when you think of, like you know, the industrial revolution. Before that, we were mostly farming and moving on our feet, and even in factory life, people were working hard and moving on our feet, and even in factory life, people were working hard. That's why we have three meals a day, because you have to fuel up at breakfast to go and bust your butt in the factory. You got to take a midday break because you've been working so hard and then you come home and you want more food and we still have three meals a day for people that sit in front of a screen all day.

Brad Kearns: 7:39

So modern life is so different that we really can't compare to some hunter-gatherer anecdote and contend that we too can engage in persistence hunting day after day.

Brad Kearns: 7:52

And in fact, the ancestral pattern was completely different than what we perceive it to be, because if we were to fail at persistence hunting, we would be someone else's dinner. To fail at persistence hunting, we would be someone else's dinner. So we did not chase after the antelope for hours and hours and finally prevail because it got too hot. But we did that once in a while and then we carried the game back to camp and we celebrated and feasted for a long time. And hunter gatherers, by definition, did the bare minimum physical activity necessary to survive, whereas today we have a tendency to overexercise, especially in the running and the fitness communities where we push ourselves so hard. Because of all the confines and the comfort and predictability of modern life, we feel compelled to push and challenge our bodies, and that stuff is all great and it's a great way to live a balanced, adventurous, active life. However, the problem occurs when you overdo it and compromise your health, compromise your fat loss goals and get into these ruts where we see as a common pattern in the fitness scene.

Philip Pape: 8:57

Yeah, perfect segue to talk about metabolism expenditure. There's a few concepts here that overlap we can maybe get into. When you talk about the Hadza, first of all, what came to mind is how much honey they eat.

Brad Kearns: 9:07

I remember watching the documentary about that.

Philip Pape: 9:10

It's pretty cool. But the idea of, for example, the constraint versus the additive model of expenditure you're familiar with Henry Ponser's work on that and the doubly labeled water study and then the fact that people overexercise I mean that is a key pillar we address on this podcast all the time is, a lot of people are doing too much and not enough of the right thing, and in my own nutrition coaching practice, plenty of a person, especially women, but I don't want to stereotype because men too will come in, just they're doing too much. And then you step back, you strip it out, you focus on lifting heavy and walking and all of a sudden so many things start to normalize. So how does this chronic cardio affect your metabolism, your ability to burn fat? And then we can lead to what are the alternatives?

Brad Kearns: 9:53

Right. This constrained model of exercise asserts that we engage in an assortment of compensatory behaviors when we expend an excessive amount of energy exercising. I think it was Dr Herman Ponser's quote where he said reproduction, repair, growth and locomotion are a zero-sum game. So locomotion means all manner of movement and workouts and your workout patterns. And then if we dedicate too much energy to locomotion we turn down these important dials of repair, reproduction and growth. So that means the compensation theory of exercise means if you wake up your alarm at 6am and go slam a spinning class or run eight miles in the freezing, cold winter temperatures in Connecticut, the rest of the day your body is going to conserve energy because you expended so much with the workout, especially if the pace was incorrect, and we'll get into that shortly. But it also means that this exhausting, depleting exercise pattern that many fitness enthusiasts are engaged in will dysregulate appetite and satiety hormones. So the 6 am spin class is paired directly with reaching for the pint of Ben and Jerry's in the evening and wolfing the whole thing down. The body does not like to be depleted and exhausted on a regular basis and we kick into these survival mechanisms that prompt us to overeat, as if the brain is telling the body well, I better finish this whole pint in case this fool tries again tomorrow morning to wake up at 6 am and burn 750 calories at spin class. So that's the constrained model of integer expenditure as we turn down other dials. And the additive model, like you mentioned, is this long flawed notion where you can go on the internet and calculate your basal metabolic rate and then go determine that a spin class burns between 650 and 700 calories and then add that up and, as the calculation finishes here, you should lose 42 pounds of excess body fat in one year because you're doing spin class three days a week and obviously we've learned that that's a disastrous, dismal failure.

Brad Kearns: 12:03

But to continue on this rant, to answer your question, what happens when you engage in overly stressful endurance exercise patterns is that you chronically overproduce stress hormones and they linger in your bloodstream, just like they do in our hectic, high-stress modern life.

Brad Kearns: 12:20

So we already have stressful lifestyle patterns that are in disconnect with our ancestral model and our genetic expectation for health.

Brad Kearns: 12:28

And now you layer on top that 6 am spin class or that long distance run and that 30 miles a week that you're trying to hit, and then work it up to 40 miles a week before the marathon comes in the final months, and what happens is it's stress on top of more stress, and when you put out too much cortisol people are familiar with that term as the preeminent stress hormone when you do that routinely, your body gets the signals, the genetic signals are sent to add body fat and shed lean muscle mass and, in particular, you are prompted to store visceral fat.

Brad Kearns: 13:03

That's the health destructive fat that collects around the organs, even worse than the subcutaneous fat, which is stored all over in your problem areas and is largely. It's not a big health concern, but the visceral fat has immediate destructive effects to your overall health and your hormone balance. And this is what happens to endurance freaks that train too hard and push their bodies without that balance of stress and rest and also a more varied fitness program where, like you say, you're doing the low-risk activities like lifting weights are far more safe than just jogging down the road with your elevated, cushioned shoes.

Philip Pape: 13:39

And I want to put a pin in a topic to get to later, if we don't forget, because I do want to address the corner case of the person who can do a high level of endurance activity and balance things out. I want to talk about that but in the meantime, a few things just to clarify for folks listening because you put that so clearly is, if you're trying to burn an extra 100 calories from more activity, you're probably going to offset a fraction of that, if not the whole thing, through this compensatory mechanism.

Brad Kearns: 14:07

Yeah, philip, when I worked for a spinning company, the spinning indoor cycling program, my friend Johnny G invented spinning and we were trying to educate consumers about different things and so we actually funded a study to see what the calorie burning was like. And a spin class burns around 650 to 700 calories in that 45 minute class. And then I did a macronutrient analysis of a Jamba Juice medium smoothie and a breakfast scone and it was like 710. So you're going at 6am if you do a spin class, you're going to be tending to reaching for that extra food to replenish depleted glycogen.

Philip Pape: 14:47

Yeah, and guess what, if you're tracking and you use willpower or discipline to not do that, then you're just going to be starving. So it's just either way right. It all works out one way or the other, and this is why I like the body, treating the body as a closed system. Because you mentioned BMR calculators and people know the pie charts that have BMR, thermic, effective food, exercise and non-exercise, and they try to add it all together and really what you should do is okay, this is what I'm eating, this is how my weight is changing. Therefore, I know how many calories I'm burning. And that's effectively what Ponser and the guys did is, they said, almost everybody on the planet has roughly the same BMR when normalized for muscle mass, when normalized for body composition, and so that's not going to be an efficient way to burn more calories, and I know we're going to get to one. That is that everybody knows we're going to talk about, which is walking.

Brad Kearns: 15:35

On that note, I came up with some interesting research in the course of writing this book, which was really fascinating. Someone who is sedentary and unfit this is the sitting is the new smoking body of research. But what's happening there is that they are engaging overactive inflammatory processes and stress reactivity end quote. I'm remembering this, burned into my brain. So they are burning energy in an inappropriate manner.

Brad Kearns: 16:04

And the analogy that was brought up was like the firefighters are in the station and they're not getting any calls on the truck and so they're racing up and down the stairs and then they're coming over to your house just for practice and so they bash in your front door and they run up around and they also put an ax into your stairway and then they go back to the station and rest and then do it to someone else's house. So we don't want these overactive inflammatory processes and stress reactivity, but that's what's happening if you do insufficient exercise and don't burn the calories in the correct manner through extensive everyday walking and dedicating yourself to an appropriately designed fitness program. And that's again because you mentioned the ceiling. It made me think of that and like, wait a second, how is my unfit, lazy neighbor burning the same number of calories per day, as I am. When I'm going to these, 6 am spinning classes. Some of it is devoted to the body not working right.

Philip Pape: 17:01

Yeah, it is fascinating when you look at walking versus standing and not being sedentary versus cardio versus lifting and when you kind of combine the best of those. I was just talking to my coach the other day about having better work capacity and conditioning when you're a lifter. Are there benefits to that from a nutrient partitioning perspective? And there is evidence that shows that if you're trying to build muscle, for example, and you're in a calorie surplus, a little bit more of that will go toward muscle. If you're a little bit better conditioned, it doesn't mean doing a bunch of cardio. It just shows how, like we're kind of meant to be fit people. You know doing things.

Brad Kearns: 17:36

Yeah, and also, uh, you're probably familiar with Chris Hinshaw. He's a big coach in the CrossFit scene, his business is called Aerobic Capacity and he's a former compatriot of mine on the professional triathlon circuit. So we both had that extreme endurance background Now, you know, transformed into he's a big CrossFit guy and I'm a sprinter and a high jumper in Masters track and field. But he was discovering when he started working with the CrossFit athletes that these guys are so powerful and explosive and have the amazing ability to do 10 box jumps and then climb the rope and then do some upside down handstand pushups. However, with the lack of that baseline endurance or that baseline aerobic capacity, they're going to do this amazingly impressive workout and bomb out in 17 minutes instead of 31. And they're going to get eliminated in the CrossFit Games regionals instead of going to the finals. So every athlete in every sport obviously the elite soccer players and the NBA players who are running up and down the court everyone needs this aerobic foundation in order to thrive and perform, even in the most explosive events.

Brad Kearns: 18:44

A power lifter okay, the most explosive sport of all where your effort is four seconds long, the longest thing they're asking you to do is lift the weight off the ground. But how long do these guys' workouts last? They last for hours. They do a two and a half hour weightlifting session. So as soon as you get out of the car and walk through the parking lot to the front door of the gym and beep your pass and get your towel and head over to the weights and do a warm-up set and then sit and go through your text messages, which apparently is part of gym culture these days. And I often wonder because I'm not a big gym guy, philip, but I'm like I see a guy on the bench press machine that I want to use, but he's resting between sets and sending text messages. Is it okay to say hey?

Philip Pape: 19:30

can you text like one bench over, so I can do my one set and move on with my life. It is okay. It is okay. It's a genetic to say can I work in there? Yeah, you should tell him to pace around, get some steps, yeah exactly, but I'm making the point.

Brad Kearns: 19:39

It's like as soon as you get out of your car car your heart rate is at least double resting rate, and spiking up even higher when you're doing sets. But when you're sitting on the bench texting it's still double resting rate. So you are getting a cardiovascular training effect for that entire hour and 45 minutes that you're goofing around in the gym in between doing hard stuff, and so that counts toward your cardio quotient to the extent that you don't have to go and pound out miles on the road to hit that checkbox on your total fitness scoreboard.

Philip Pape: 20:14

Yeah, that's right Because, again, I used to do CrossFit and you get conditioned but you also burn out and if you look at the competitors, they also focus a lot on their strength and their exercise. You know their movements to where they have a strength base as well, such that the cardio, the conditioning for them, visceral fat. But you mentioned something specific. You said it can break down muscle tissue, I believe, which means it's catabolic, and people love to understand, or don't always understand, that concept of anabolic behaviors eating anabolically, having higher energy flux through walking that it's anabolic. Recovering is anabolic, Hormones are anabolic, but catabolic is the opposite. I don't know where you stand on carbs. This is just a side tangent, but I often talk about how sometimes carbs can be anti-catabolic when you're building muscle. But anyway, that's a separate topic yeah, well said, exactly.

Philip Pape: 21:09

Yeah, yeah. So I know you said walking is anabolic and running is catabolic, so maybe explain that a little more for folks.

Brad Kearns: 21:16

Oh, my goodness, that's so funny. You bring up this because Mark and I spent probably a week talking back and forth to add a couple paragraphs to the book to explain it properly, and it's so complex, but we want to give you the simple insights. But just as a background, like body is, it's an oversimplification to say this is catabolic, this is anabolic, but it makes the point really well. But at all times the body's undergoing processes that are both actually and the best example is sleep. So sleep is called an amphibolic process because you are both engaging in catabolism as well as, of course, anabolic. Uh, when you talk about, you know restoring and repairing and regenerating with your overnight sleep. So with walking, it is sending signals to the body for anabolic processes because it's minimally destructive, you have minimal impact, trauma and you're getting all these processes working. Where you're getting more blood flowing, oxygen delivery, you're building a brain-derived neurotropic factor to help with neuroplasticity. So all this great stuff is happening with minimal penalty or destruction or breakdown. Now with running overall for most runners, because they are not fit enough to really do the sport in a manner that is minimally stressful and building the aerobic system, they're just breaking down the body over and over with a slightly too stressful pace and also incorrect form. That's resulting in more impact trauma, because what we see this pattern is the over-striding, breaking, jarring heel-striking pattern as seen in 80 to 95% of all recreational runners, according to Dr Daniel Lieberman's research at Harvard percent of all recreational runners, according to dr daniel lieberman's research at harvard. And so the reason that we see so much of this overstriding braking pattern are people that are poorly adapted, have insufficient overall physical competency and musculoskeletal resiliency to run with correct form. Why are they running or how are they able to run?

Brad Kearns: 23:19

It was the invention of the elevated cushion shoe back in the 1970s by Nike. So these shoes came out where you could put on the shoe and shuffle down the street with this heel striking pattern and go and run five miles, whereby, if you didn't have these magical shoes, you'd be traumatized after two minutes or three minutes and your calves and your feet would hurt because of the poor running form. So the shoes enable poorly adapted people to run who should not be running in the first place. Do they cause poor form? Of course not. It's an innate object that sits on a shelf and so what they do is enable poor form.

Brad Kearns: 23:57

What's the cause of poor running form. It's that lack of basic physical fitness. So you have tight hip flexors, you have tight hamstrings, you have dysfunctional glutes because they don't fire, because your form is incorrect. You have poor core strength and poor foundation, so that you have an insufficient forward lean of the trunk, so you're allowed to do this breaking stride. You have poor ankle mobility and all these factors against you because you're not a super fit person and you have a lot of sedentary patterns in life. And then you insist on shuffling down the road at this dangerous sport that is gonna drive chronic overuse injury.

Philip Pape: 24:35

Because it's so easy, right? You just lace up your shoes, no equipment needed, and you just go. Yeah, so I know the shoes in the 70s and I believe there was some book in the 70s too, that I don't know if you know which one it is that led to a huge the fitness revolution, or whatever.

Brad Kearns: 24:49

what came to running this running boom kicked off, and it's important to understand, because there's been so much hype and marketing commentary socializing us to think that running is this end all fitness accomplishment, when in fact it's, you know, mainly catabolic and prompts accumulation of fat rather than reduction of fat and prompts the loss of muscle. And boy, we really got into this mess with profit driven corporate marketing forces with a big interest in it, especially the running shoe advertising Just do it is widely regarded as the greatest advertising campaign of all time, and so, hey, how can you resist? And I want to clarify that, like getting people off the couch in comfortable modern life and out, doing something is a great step forward for mankind, but it's really important to do it correctly, otherwise we can actually be worse off than someone who just engages in a basic level of activity, like tending to their garden and walking down to the post office to mail a letter, and all those quaint memories that we have from a previous time, before the fitness boom kicked into gear.

Philip Pape: 25:58

Yeah, so we addressed some of the reasons why running is not great for fat loss. Not only that it breaks down muscle tissue, but you also compensate for the calorie burn. It also causes overtraining, which means you're not going to be moving as much or you're going to impede recovery. But just to make it super clear for people I know there's this idea running makes you tone, it burns fat. It's just part of that culture. Why is just that not the case? Just so people know. Like the big bullet points behind that.

Brad Kearns: 26:26

Well, it's not a very demanding sport for the overall musculoskeletal system. Right, you're just shuffling down the road. Go look at the elite runners in the Olympics. These guys are super skinny and somewhat emaciated, but they're also ripped and they're fine athletes and they're running at a very, very high speed. So it's sort of like a different deal when you look at a guy who's running a two-hour marathon or running the 10K around the track in 26 minutes. They're extremely highly trained athletes and very fit and have the physique of a champion.

Brad Kearns: 26:59

So the recreational aspect, where people are running very, very slowly. However, they're still stressing their bodies too much with the simple act of running that they're not adapted to do. So it's kind of like pushing yourself to do a bunch of deadlifts, of squats with really crappy form and continuing and insisting to continue and do more and more sets until you're really tired and your form's even worse, and then you get injured and exhausted and reach for the Ben and Jerry's. We wouldn't dream of doing that, that stupid of a workout in the gym, but basically that's what we're seeing every day when people are going for that weekly mileage goal, with that poor form, with that excess impact, trauma and the overeating and the appetite and satiety dysregulation that occurs from overly stressful pattern. And one thing when you listed off those reasons that were criticizing running, we forgot another huge one, which is, if you're devoting all this energy to cardiovascular endurance training at a slightly to significantly too stressful of a pace, guess what you don't have time and energy for anymore. You don't have time to even dabble in weights and go do one set through the machines once a week, or the very bare minimum necessary to maintain functional muscle mass and muscle strength, and forget about probably the greatest return on investment of any workout known to mankind, which is sprinting right. So the brief, explosive, all out sprints are the thing that we lose more quickly with aging than we do the cardiovascular endurance.

Brad Kearns: 28:36

I talked to my mom about this. She's 87. She's in fantastic shape and she walks one to two miles every morning with her dog and she's very proud of it and looks around at people her age who are falling apart and I say, hey, that walk is great, that's a great foundation. Now you need to keep that appointment with the personal trainer at the gym and you need to go put your body under resistance load to maintain that muscle mass. It's absolutely essential and I think you know it's nice to see now with the content you're putting out and many other people like strength training and sprinting are vastly more important than this baseline cardiovascular steady state endurance training Because, as I mentioned, you are getting cardio if you become a competent strength trainer or a sprinter.

Philip Pape: 29:19

Okay. So you opened the door to sprinting because I wasn't even going to go there. I was next going to say okay. So we know pretty much for a fact that you could lose fat, be fit, not have to run ever. Trust me, I know from personal experience and coaching many, many clients who don't want to run and they don't have to run. But sprinting is its own form of running, in its own category, and I will say I love it. I don't do it as often as I used to. Again, in CrossFit, my favorite thing to do was shuttle runs.

Philip Pape: 29:44

I love the ones where the every minute on the minute where you had to do like I don't know, I think it was 10 meters, and then on the second minute you do 10 meters and then 10 meters back and then on the third you add another segment. You see, if you can get up to like 18 was a pretty good. Like you know, I have an ego. I'm satisfying my ego right when you get to like 18, but let's dive into that then, because I don't talk about that enough on the show. I'm not against it. I talk about things like pushing and pulling sleds. We talk about if you need to go on the bike or do some swimming or something that is completely concentric without the eccentric loading. That's cool, you know, for a session here or there, but tell us about sprinting.

Brad Kearns: 30:22

Well, if we had more space on the cover, the book would appropriately be titled Humans Are Born to Walk and Sprint. Okay, and so that is. Our essential genetic expectation for health and survival is that we need to be prepared. In primal times we need to run for our lives or run to get food so we didn't starve, and so that selection pressure, the genetic adaptations occurred where we became great endurance machines, as discussed earlier, and we also became very strong and we became powerful and explosive to deal with a primal hazard. So we want to honor those genetic expectations for health today, and sprinting is a hugely important piece of the puzzle.

Brad Kearns: 31:04

Interestingly, it doesn't take that much time, so it's not a huge ask to have someone sprinkle in some sprinting stimulation into their fitness regimen. And we're talking about when we really use the term sprint properly. We're talking about a brief, explosive, nearly all-out effort, and we know from exercise physiology the human can only deliver a maximum effort for seven seconds. Right, that's what the ATP, creatine, phosphate, the energy inside the cell where you can go full bore, starts to peter out at seven seconds, and so anything over seven seconds is not technically a pure sprint. So when we watch the 100 meters in the Olympics and the guys run 9.79,. They're actually decelerating a bit in the final stages of even the fastest, most explosive event in the Olympics. So that's something to understand when we talk about sprinting. The ideal template for a workout would be to sprint for 10 to 20 seconds. Yes, sprinting for seven seconds is great, but if we get 10 to 20 seconds then we're getting some good fitness stimulation. But we're stopping before we incur too much cellular stress and musculoskeletal trauma and stress hormone production because the workout's too brutal and your tongue's hanging out at the end.

Brad Kearns: 32:20

So a proper sprint workout is not Rocky Balboa puking on the side of the road from going so fast so many times. It's a very crisp, explosive session where you're executing precise technique and you do not degrade over the course of the workout. So, unlike high intensity interval training where you're hanging on and you got two more and you can do it and the group is rallying around you and you high five at the end as you're dripping in a pool of sweat during that spin class where you're asked to go over and over again for 30 second sprints with 30 seconds rest and we're going to go for it, that's one form of training but true, sprinting is an extensive amount of rest in between very brief bursts of all out performance. So I give this recommended template for anyone could be a four to eight sprints lasting between 10 and 20 seconds, with a minimum six to one recovery to work ratio. So if you're sprinting for 10 seconds, you rest for at least a minute before you do another sprint and that gives you this consistent quality of high performance effort with each rep. You only have to do four to eight.

Brad Kearns: 33:32

Oh question, in the back of the class, what if I get really good and fit and I do eight good ones? Then what you're going to do is you're going to go faster. You're not going to go up to 12 someday or 14, or keep adding volume, as we've been socialized to believe inaccurately by fitness programming where it's like more, more, more. With sprinting it's all about quality and extensive rest and, as you read on my bio, now that I'm a master sprinter and having to learn all the attributes of sprinting that weren't familiar to me as a longtime endurance athlete, I'm getting scolded by my advisors because I'm only taking a six to one ratio, which I feel is plenty for me.

Brad Kearns: 34:12

But to do to get fast at 10 second sprints, you might want to rest for two or three or four minutes before you do another one, and that's just a more sophisticated level of sprint training. But for the basic template for everybody is that four to eight sprints, 10 to 20 seconds, six to one ratio, and then you're opening up a whole new world of fitness benefits. Especially, and probably of most interest to people, is the ability to shed excess body fat quickly, especially visceral fat, and there's great research showing that sprinting targets visceral fat reduction in particular, because visceral fat is more metabolically active than subcutaneous fat, so it makes it easier to remove if you send the right genetic signals through things like sprinting or I guess you could arguably throw in fasting and things like that that are trying to rev up the metabolism.

Philip Pape: 35:06

I have to say, brad, you've got the bug in me all right, so I got to do this now Because you're right, the way I used to do it was more of the HIIT style that you're talking about, and I absolutely love this prescription and the caution to only go up in intensity, only go up in speed, as your form of progressive overload for your sprinting is really good, because then people aren't doing oh, now I'm doing 12 of these, now I'm doing 20. Guess what? My Brad Kearns protocol is now an hour long. It doesn't work that way. This is good. I'm going to follow up on this with you later and then this could be a whole separate topic to dive into. All right, cool Sprinting, brad. Good, everybody has that.

Brad Kearns: 35:43

Oh yeah, sprinting is definitely a full show dedicated to that.

Brad Kearns: 35:48

And when we look at these research benefits like brain-derived neurotropic factor and just making you a more confident, resilient person, and also what sprinting does is it reduces perceived exertion at all lower levels of exercise intensity.

Brad Kearns: 36:03

So if you become competent at sprinting, your five mile jog or your hour long group exercise class in the gym, everything feels easier and it literally is easier because, as you know from like central governor theory, your perception of how difficult the workout is is how difficult the workout is.

Brad Kearns: 36:23

And so when we say my quads got really tired on my 12th rep of squats, it's not literally true. The quads don't have feelings and emotions and think they're tired. It's your brain that gets tired because you never worked that top end, and so everything becomes sort of a challenge or grueling or all these sensations where we need to teach the body to perform that brief, explosive, powerful as the essence of anti-aging. So the anti-aging benefits are tremendous and, in contrast to that chronic overproduction of stress hormones that I talk about with an endurance training regimen, what sprinting does is an appropriately brief fight or flight spike of hormones into the bloodstream and then, because the workout is over quickly. You're able to quickly recalibrate back to homeostasis and come back stronger and more resilient, thanks to testosterone and growth hormone coursing through your bloodstream, acting upon target organs, building more muscle, shedding excess body fat and improving the brain's perception of fatigue during exercise.

Philip Pape: 37:29

Yeah, the mind-body thing is really powerful there you mentioned. This reminds me a lot of just the system we use for lifting right, it's the ATP-CP system, and if you look at the physique of sprinters, you know that they're not emaciated like long distance runners.

Brad Kearns: 37:47

Yeah, there's a popular quip when we're doing live lectures and you ask have you ever seen a fat sprinter?

Brad Kearns: 37:55

And the answer is no. There's no such thing, because it's the penalty for carrying excess body fat when you're going at high speed is so severe that the genetic signaling will occur every time you do a sprint workout to shed that excess body fat, to adapt and become stronger for next time. Now, have you ever seen a fat marathon runner? In fact, the research from Cape Town Marathon in South Africa determined that 30% of the participants were over the healthy BMI range. And then we compare contrast to World Health Organization research showing that 30% of the global population, largely in the developed nations, is also outside of healthy BMI range. So when you go to an event and you cannot distinguish between the spectators and the participants, you got a problem with your sport. You go to a powerlifting meet I can see who's competing in the heavyweight division and who's watching, but the marathoning generally does not support any improvement in physique and can actually cause extreme harm with that accumulation of visceral fat and the loss of muscle mass.

Philip Pape: 39:02

Yeah, and I know when I've sprinted and I've asked people to just do it randomly who are lifters, who squat a lot, it's like that base of power goes a long way as well. They're a duo, they're like.

Philip Pape: 39:12

Batman and Robin. There, it's cool. Yeah, it's pretty cool, all right. So on the other side of the spectrum, you posted something on Instagram just recently, a few days ago that said endurance running the way most people do it prompts increased laziness in general life, and I'm very intrigued by that. I want you to tell me more about that one.

Brad Kearns: 39:29

Yeah, it happens both consciously and subconsciously. So when you're proud of yourself for waking up on the cold, snowy morning and running eight miles before most of your neighbors are awake, or they're shuffling out to pick up the newspaper and head back into the warm home, what happens is you give yourself permission, you give yourself a hall pass to be lazier throughout the day. And so when you're asked, hey, do you mind raking the leaves this afternoon? You say I'll do it tomorrow because I ran eight miles this morning and I'm tired and lazy. So, on a conscious level, you give those hall passes for another scoop of ice cream, another serving, another helping at the meal, and runners glow and crow about how they have a free pass to eat more food.

Brad Kearns: 40:20

And you were mentioning the books that helped launch the running boom. One of them was the complete book of running by Jim fix, who famously dropped out of a heart attack at age 51, ignoring all recommendations to get medical checkups, even though he had a family history. And he would write passages like the great thing about running is when the furnace is hot enough, anything will burn. In other words, you don't have to scrutinize your dietary choices because you're burning so many calories. And this became a cultural paradigm in the seventies. And even the leading cardiovascular experts at the time the doctor, said the same thing they thought you would be heart attack proof if you could run a marathon and now're seeing the opposite a rash of heart problems in long-time extreme athletes.

Brad Kearns: 41:01

But back to the permissions where consciously you give yourself those hall passes and then subconsciously the body engages in these energy conserving mechanisms to react to what's perceived as a survival threat and so you need to conserve energy.

Brad Kearns: 41:18

You turn down those other dials, remember they are reproduction repair and growth in favor of excess locomotion. And I think the most extreme example when we talk about reproduction for males that would mean one's libido and for females, reproductive fitness can go awry with these extremely high-performing females when their body fat drops below a threshold and they experience amenorrhea, the loss of menstruation. So whether or not you're interested in family planning and what's happening in the immediate future, our primary biological drive to exist is to reproduce. So when one loses reproductive fitness, this is an extreme indicator that one's stress mechanisms and lifestyle are out of balance. And the elite female athletes deal with that routinely, especially in the sports that demand low body fat. So if you see a female with six pack. She is treading on thin ice, even though she looks great and is getting a lot of followers on her social media posts. Um, the body does not really want to be pushed that hard and you have to make all these concessions for general health.

Brad Kearns: 42:26

Yeah, and one thing I mentioned uh, you know I was. I was pro circuit for nine years, so I traveled around the world. I trained all day. I slept for half of my life during my career as a pro triathlete 12 hours, 10 hours a night and two hour every afternoon. But I also experienced all around five or six colds every year and it was just part of life as a pro triathlete, with all that traveling and all that training. So, hey, that's nine years times, let's say six.

Brad Kearns: 42:58

I had 50 upper respiratory minor infections in my peak years of ages 20 to 30. Kind of ridiculous, when you think about it, that I was bashing my immune system and suppressing it so routinely with all that stress, hormone production. And, on a less extreme example, that's what the recreational enthusiast is dealing with, because they have little kids that they have to get up and deal with school and then they have to go to work and be responsible and rake the leaves and they want to run eight miles in the morning and it's too much. In contrast, that sprint workout that I described fills you with energy and enthusiasm and a level uh appetite and satiety hormone, uh status, so that you go through life eating healthy, nutritious meals and feeling great and having more energy because you work out and train rather than less hey, just wanted to give a shout out to philip.

Jerry: 43:49

I personally worked with philip for about eight months and I lost a total of 33 pounds of scale weight and about five inches off my waist.

Jerry: 43:57

Two things I really enjoy about working with Philip is number one. He's really taken the time to develop a deep expertise in nutrition and also resistance training, so he has that depth. If you want to go deep on the lies with Philip, but if also if you want to just kind of get some instruction and more practical advice and a plan on what you need to do, you can pull back and communicate at that level. Also, he is a lifter himself, so he's very familiar with the performance and body composition goals that most lifters have. And also Philip is trained in engineering, so he has some very efficient systems set up to make the coaching experience very easy and very efficient and you can really track your results and you will have real data when you're done working with Philip and also have access to some tools likely that you can continue to use. If all that sounds interesting to you. Philip, like all good coaches, has a ton of free information out there and really encourage you to see if he may be able to help you out. So thanks again, philip.

Philip Pape: 45:00

Yeah, again, the parallel with lifting is I was thinking the exact same thing when you talked about running. I used to try to train for half marathon. I never got there. That was many years ago. I hated it, I hated the running. But yeah, you felt like, well, I just did this thing and now I'm exhausted and the rest of the day is done and maybe I'm going to eat more too. But lifting and sprinting give you a different feeling, especially with the cortisol. It helps you manage that and feel like you want to be productive, and there's also the mental resilience you get of overcoming these hard things.

Philip Pape: 45:30

The costs of getting lean are very important. You just mentioned that. We've talked about that as well, and we've talked to bodybuilders about it who are like, look, it's a serious thing, it's an extreme. Like any other sport, you have to be willing to do the trade-offs, like the immune system. People don't think about that. But if you've already got metabolic adaptation happening during fat loss, now you're just going to exacerbate it with all the other stuff happening. So all great stuff. So you mentioned heart health and I think you've talked about something called the Fat Max heart rate. Do I have that right in my notes and people are thinking again running heart health zone two it's all the rage now getting doing zone training. What are your thoughts on that?

Brad Kearns: 46:06

Yeah, that's funny because I was just looking down at my notes is the one thing that's really important to cover, and you mentioned it briefly at the outset. It's sort of like when can you get permission to run and when can it be beneficial? So it's the metabolic and stress impact of one's workout that determines whether it is supportive to long-term fitness improvement as well as longevity, or whether it can set you back. And so there's this important concept called fat max heart rate, and it represents the intensity level at which you are burning the maximum number of fat calories per minute, and that goes with the heart rate. So fat max heart rate is widely regarded as 180 minus.

Brad Kearns: 46:47

Your age is a great way to pretty accurately estimate your fat max. So I'm about to be 60 years old, so I go 180 minus 60. My fat max heart rate, my training heart rate at fat max, is 120. If I were to speed up and raise my heart rate and go faster, of course I'm gonna be burning more calories the faster I go. You burn more calories sprinting than you do when jogging or walking right. But at fat max, what happens if you envision a upside down U-shaped curve is you start burning fewer fat calories per minute in favor of a quick spike in glucose burning as well as a quick spike in ventilation and stress, hormone production and everything. So this cutoff point is so important to recognize because if you go past fat max, the workout now becomes moderately stressful rather than energizing and restorative. So the amount of low intensity movement that one can do there is virtually no ceiling to the benefits you accrue. So if I say, philip, hey, let's take this summer, take a break from podcasting and let's hike the 2,000-mile Appalachian Trail in 90 days, that would by and large be a tremendously healthy way to spend the summer. We're hiking at a comfortable pace, we're outdoors, we're getting sunlight, we're getting de-stressed from mobile technology and taking breaks and having all kinds of great benefits. So there's no upper limit to the benefits of moving more.

Brad Kearns: 48:14

There's research from Cooper Institute about this group called Super Exercisers and they studied these people that reportedly exercise 30 to 35 hours per week for decades. I'm envisioning like someone retired who walks five miles every morning and then walks the dog for another 30 minutes at night. Whoever these people are that can put in that much exercise, but they're super healthy and they have great longevity. Obviously it's not extreme exercise at that level. But the active lifestyle is number one. Then what happens when you exceed fat max heart rate routinely? Then you are getting into these glucose burning workouts that are turning you into a sugar burner and a sugar chomper. You are suppressing immune function in favor of this chronic stress hormone production and all the benefits kind of go out the window when you routinely exceed what is regarded as that cutoff between a stressful workout and a restorative workout.

Brad Kearns: 49:12

You mentioned all the fascination with zone two and it's wonderful to see this popularity now because the upper limit of zone two correlates with that fat max heart rate. But one contention I have with the fitness movement right now is no one's giving enough love to zone one and the amazing cardiovascular benefits you accrue when you're doing very comfortably paced zone one exercise, like getting out of the car, walking across the parking lot, sending text messages between your sets you're still in zone one and you're still getting all kinds of training effect to the fat burning enzymes and energy systems in the body. Here's an important anecdote or a comparison Elouid Kipchoge, the greatest marathon runner of all time, the guy who ran 159 in the marathon and two Olympic gold medals. He performs 83% of his weekly mileage in zone one, not zone two. Of his weekly mileage in zone one, not zone two, zone one, he does around 9% in zone two and 7% at the higher zones where he's really hitting it hard and doing these amazing track workouts. But what he's mostly doing for you and I, the direct comparison would be a medium to brisk walk.

Brad Kearns: 50:25

Now, for him, zone one is eight minute pace per mile at high altitude for an easy 15 mile run. Uh, because he's so physically conditioned. Yeah, and he's running a marathon, by the way, at a pace of four, 34 per mile. So an eight minute mile, even though it's pretty impressive to you and I, is way, way slower 63% slower than his marathon pace. Wait a second. Take the average marathoner and slow down 63%. Guess what you're doing? You're walking and you're training, just like the greatest runner of all time trains. There's the argument to emphasize walking and not worrying about having to shuffle down with this breaking stride because you're not adapted to run correctly anyway.

Philip Pape: 51:08

Yeah, I love it. Two things come to mind there, brad. One is recent research that confirmed again that the volume of movement, no matter the intensity, is pretty much equally effective for heart health. Right, which is what you're kind of saying. Like, you can walk, walk, walk, walk a ton and it's cool, like, and it's great for you. It also makes me think about the mode of movement and training. We've been talking about combining walking with lifting and sprinting. When you lift for 90 minutes like that's typical for me, a 90 minute session and I look at my Apple watch there are moments that I peak into zone two on a heavy deadlift or on, you know if the rest period short or whatever, so you're going to hit zone two and then sprinting, you're going to hit it, of course, maybe even zone three or four, because that's very short, yeah, whatever Zone five.

Philip Pape: 51:52

Zone five, and the percentages you mentioned actually align perfectly with that idea. Not that you have to measure it I don't even care about it, to be honest, and personally I don't know if you do but I just Not at all.

Brad Kearns: 52:03

No, I mean, the reason you need to care about heart rate is if you're at risk of getting into these chronic patterns. So when I was a pro triathlete, I obsessively measured my heart rate at every single workout, making sure that that beeper alarm did not go off, because that is the destruction of a desired effect of the training session and I could not get away with that stuff. And, interestingly, because I was so fit back when I was a young person and racing fast, I would do a lot of my workouts in zone one, just like Kipchoge, because zone two was six minute pace per mile and you can't pound the body with that kind of impact, even though it feels comfortable. And I'm still chit chatting with my training partner the training becomes too stressful and so the fitter you get, the more time you're spending building that aerobic base correctly. But again, we have to realize that the stress is relative, such that our protocol for preparing for our modest endurance goals would be a lot of walking and then an occasional effort where you push your body hard and you have a great effort doing the weekend 10k race or whatever it is, whatever your goals are.

Brad Kearns: 53:09

So I don't want to blanketly trash running.

Brad Kearns: 53:12

It's been a part of my life forever and I've got a lot of great benefits out of it. I have buddies from high school that are still running and enjoying it because they've been fit their whole life and the run is like a brisk walk for most people, but we have to honor that. Fat max heart rate is like a brisk walk for most people, but we have to honor that fat max heart rate. See what that represents for us in our own workout protocol and accordingly proceed at that pace rather than bullheadedly and doggedly assume a running pace because you think that you have to. And also what this means is the duration of the workout has to be at, or below fat max heart rate. So what this means is the duration of the workout has to be at, or below fat max heart rate. Right? So as we get tired as the workout proceeds, we have to slow down, and so you might be able to run one or two miles jogging before that heart watch beeps and then it's going to start beeping the rest of the workout.

Philip Pape: 54:00

Fair point, because the fixed point is that heart rate, which then shifts as you get fatigued.

Brad Kearns: 54:05

Yeah, and what a lot of people do is they say, hey, let's go and keep a nine minute per mile pace for our six mile run. Well, that doesn't make any sense to the body and the brain. The brain knows intensity and the heart knows intensity. So your nine minute pace should be nine nine, nine, 20, nine, 45, 10, 10, 15, whatever, because we're honoring heart rate, not blindly adhering to some pace. The only time that you should do that is in a race where you're trying to run your best time. Of course you want to run the same split per mile. That's how records are set and personal records are set, but training is entirely different than race model for most people two more things I want to cover before I do.

Philip Pape: 54:46

I wanted to say a nerdy thing. When you mentioned the fat max heart rate and you said you know, it's in the shape of and I thought you were going to say parabola, because I'm a math guy and you said upside down you, which is what most people would get.

Brad Kearns: 54:56

You're a good communicator, but like, I think, parabola, that's the word I was looking for. Oh, okay, okay.

Philip Pape: 55:02

But it's okay. You probably don't want to use it in most contexts, as people are like what are you talking about? Um, I was thinking of price optimization from economics, where you have like price economics major.

Brad Kearns: 55:13

So now I'm with you, man. I remember that, the price optimization curve. Yeah, I had a instructor with a british accent. Let's, let's, investigate our price optimization curve. Oh, you can't charge too much and make more money. I see, I see.

Philip Pape: 55:28

Unless you want to preserve your monopoly. It's Microsoft new back when they sold Windows 98. They sold it way cheaper than the price. Max profit maximization to keep the market, you know.

Brad Kearns: 55:37

Wow.

Philip Pape: 55:37

Anyway. So two final things. That one is let's talk about people who do love running or maybe are good at it or want to get good at it and still want to do it, and they're like I hear you, brad, but I still want to run. How do I do it? And then we can conclude with how do people incorporate walking? I think those are two good places to kind of end the.

Brad Kearns: 55:55

Nice. So you want permission to run? That's great. Let's first look at the propensity for an addictive approach. And we have a whole chapter in the book called the Ordeal of the Obligate Runner. And the very definition of addiction is requiring a hit or a dose in order to feel normal. So we think about the addicts on the street. They're drug addicts and they need it. They steal money and they want to go get high. Well, it's not really that they want to get high, that might have been at the start. They need to steal money and go get their drug to feel normal, to get to baseline.

Brad Kearns: 56:30

So if you're listening and you're wondering, am I an addict to exercise? If you feel cranky, irritable and out of sorts, if you miss your workout on a particular day, this is a sign of addiction or an unhealthy obsession with exercise. And that's very easy to drift in that direction, especially as your goals become more refined and sophisticated, as in you get more and more immersed into endurance culture or gym culture or CrossFit culture. So we have to be very careful and realize like and I had to learn this as a high performing athlete to like hey, look in the mirror and what are my goals? My goals are to excel in the races. And what are my goals? My goals are to excel in the races and I'm making a living at this, so it's very important. It's not just a hobby. So I need to take absolute best care of my body. So I had built in guardrails against overtraining, because if I disperse that energy in the workout, it was costing me a chance at winning prize money in the race. So you very quickly become a really, really smart trainer when you get your ass kicked in the race because you came in a little bit tired. So those are nice protocols to have and I'm just honoring that and sharing that with other people that like look, if you're here to do a favor for your health, to promote longevity, to prevent disease and to get the body composition of your dreams, these are all warranting a sensible approach rather than an overly stressful approach. So that permission to run let's really ask what you're all about. And if you want to really enjoy yourself and take care of yourself, you can slow down and it's okay and you're still getting a good workout. But that permission comes from how well you perform at fat max heart rate. Now here's another little side note. If you're not, if you're frustrated that you have to go so slow, you're allowed to do jog walks for the duration of your workout. So you can go and jog for 30 seconds and then walk it off just as your heart rate's about to climb and start beeping and ruining the intended metabolic effects of the workout. You walk for a minute or two or three or four minutes and then do another jog and then walk and then do another jog, so you get some running in. You get that sensation of running. That's great.

Brad Kearns: 58:41

The other side of the coin that you asked was how do we get a more walking-oriented lifestyle?

Brad Kearns: 58:47

I think we have to make a fundamental shift in our mindset and our philosophy to put walking in a different category.

Brad Kearns: 58:56

It's not like a fitness option, it's really like sleep.

Brad Kearns: 59:00

It's a human genetic expectation for health and when we don't move sufficiently during everyday life, we incur all manner of immediate consequences. One of them is a decline in cognitive function the brain research. There's one study from Stanford that I mentioned in the book you experience cognitive decline after 20 minutes of focusing on an intense, peak performance cognitive task. So if you do not take a break every 20 minutes from intense work, a break will be taken for you, and I find, with my tabs open on my browser, I have these high jump videos that I love watching, and I find myself watching them instead of focusing on a book manuscript or a podcast outline because I've been working for too long. Afternoon nap, which I'm a huge fan of, because I know when I come back I'm going to be kicking butt at a different level than if I were just powering through all these natural declines in cognitive function. So that's a big vote there for just sprinkling in short and longer walks throughout the day as a fundamental necessity to be at your best anyway.

Philip Pape: 1:00:06

You're a master at reframing this stuff. I really love this. I'm glad you came on to talk about this because just the way I mean think of walking as sleep Beautiful right Because people are thinking they have to almost force themselves, or it's their training or whatever, and I haven't tried to talk about it in language like walking should just naturally flow from the things you enjoy doing and let's find a way to incorporate into your life anyway.

Brad Kearns: 1:00:30

Yeah.

Philip Pape: 1:00:30

And not think of it as trying to get steps right, Like people just think of it as trying to get steps, even though it's a good way to measure a proxy.

Brad Kearns: 1:00:36

If that works for you, that's great. You know if some accountability is fine. My other favorite example is like having a dog. I'm a big dog lover. My dog of 15 years is gone now. She had a great run but like I didn't think for a second that I wasn't motivated enough or I was too busy to get that dog out twice a day like she deserved.

Brad Kearns: 1:00:57

It's like if you're going to adopt an animal, you have a commitment, a lifelong commitment, to give the animal the life it deserves. So I don't care if it's snowing or too hot or you're too busy. You get the dog out for their daily exercise and to serve something higher than yourself and your own fickle forces of like motivation and willpower. Like you mentioned at the start of the show, that's a no brainer. So I think the dog is in your corner. And how can you turn down? I mean, look the dog in the eye and say sorry, I'm too busy, I got a work deadline. I can't take you out for five minutes, boy, that'd be tough. I can never turn my dog's face down. And then the dog has that amazing circadian programming where, at 5.07, they know it's time to eat and they're like where's my bowl? It's after five, you're late. Oh, I love it, man.

Philip Pape: 1:01:40

Yeah, yeah. We have two little dogs, and one is really good at hopping up on you. She's so little she hops like a foot up under your calf Like it's time to go out, Even if you took her out an hour before. If it's the time, it's time, like it doesn't matter.

Philip Pape: 1:01:54

Oh man, this has been fantastic. So many amazing things here about not only why to do this, but just you know the sprinting and the lifting and the walking and what it means to be a human doing hard things but also doing things that are fulfilling for our lives. Being kind of an athlete of aging is the term I've heard some people use. Is there anything we didn't cover that you think is worthwhile, that you wanted to bring up.

Brad Kearns: 1:02:17

Well, I'm glad we got into sprinting because that's been my obsession of recent years and I think it just feels so good to kind of see yourself as an actual performing athlete, where I think in endurance scene we're just shufflers, heading down the sidewalk and accumulating miles and we're so far from you know, an actual athletic competition type of mentality and even if it's not a big part of your life, I promote, you know, with my whole message and you land on my website and it says pursue peak performance with passion throughout life.

Brad Kearns: 1:02:50

I think we need something to give us an edge and give us a little bit of nervousness and, you know, trepidation that we're putting ourselves out there and we're still competing at something and pursuing goals throughout life. Because what instead we see in culture are dudes watching the NFL for seven hours every weekend and perhaps offering up some stories about how, back in the day, you know, I was supposed to play quarterback for SC but I banged up my shoulder at the summer practice and that was the end of my career. Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever, everyone's got a story and they have their heyday back in their youth and then the rest of the time we just sit around and watch others. I think there's a better way to go through life and to pick something that's scary and challenging, that you have to train for and prepare for, and that will get you out the door. When things are, you know, have a tendency to get comfortable and convenient.

Philip Pape: 1:03:41

So be an athlete, not a shuffler find an edge compete. Pursue your goal always be improving, always be improving. Pick something scary, pick something challenging. Totally on board with that philosophy, my friend.

Brad Kearns: 1:03:57

And where do you want folks to look you up? Well, we talked about Born to Walk and we have a great website called borntowalkbookcom where we have these bonus items. When you place an order at whatever retailer you like, you come back and you can get these great PDF download resources and shopping discounts and all kinds of things. I host the Be Rad podcast. I would love to have you on someday. We can talk more about strength training and that precise approach that you communicate, so maybe that'll be a good place for people to start and bradkearnscom all kinds of fun stuff going on and I'm so glad to connect with you here and great interview. Keep up doing the great work that you're doing.

Philip Pape: 1:04:32

Likewise, Brad BornToWalkBookcom. Get the free bonuses. Definitely get the book, the Be Rad podcast. I'd love to be on it. So thank you for the offer and this is a pleasure. I could talk to you for hours and, honestly, there are other topics like sprinting we could get into in the future, I'm sure.

Brad Kearns: 1:04:46

So thanks again for coming on Brad. Thanks a lot, Philip.