How to Get in Better Shape than 99% of People
agK0hj2ZhuQ — Published on YouTube channel Ali Abdaal on October 1, 2024, 4:45 PM
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This summary is generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
- Dan Goh, a top fitness coach, talks about how to get into the top 1% of fitness. He suggests building a body dashboard to inform people of what their health looks like. - Speaker B introduces Headspace, which is the sponsor of today's video, and introduces the feelgood productivity collection, which can help people on the path to building healthy habits to boost productivity and efficiency. - Speaker A thinks going for a walk is one of the most underrated exercises that people can do on their body. - The focus of the meeting was on the sleep practice. The topics covered included sleep regularity, the importance of eating a whole food, single ingredient, nutrient dense diet, and the nutrition practice. - Speaker A suggests that people should eat at least 0.8 grams of to 1 gram of protein per pound of ideal lean mass. - Speaker B introduces the six key principles that Dan and I talked about when it comes to leveling up health and fitness. If you want to learn more about evidence based ways to improve sleep, watch the video.
Video Description
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In this video I talk to fitness expert Dan Go about the 6 things you need to focus on to get your health in incredible shape, and be in the top 1% of people. It's got loads of takeaways in it, so hopefully you find it valuable. Enjoy! x
Check out Dan's channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@danfounder
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🔗 OTHER LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS VIDEO
My conversation with Professor Russel Foster about sleep: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBPYDEJ6qHc
Effects of Self-Weighing During Weight Loss Treatment: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00397/full#B24
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⌚️Timestamps:
0:00 - Introduction
0:36 - 1. The Body Dashboard
5:24 - 2. The Movement Practice
10:27 - 3. The Strength Practice
12:19 - 4. The Sleep Practice
13:36 - 5. The Nutrition Practice
16:50 - 6. The Mindset Practice
Transcription
This video transcription is generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
Speaker A: Getting yourself in shape and doing the behaviors to get yourself in shape. It is the number one meta habit that is going to make all other areas of your life better as a result of taking care of it.
Speaker B: This is Dan Goh, a top fitness coach, who I recently spoke to about how to get in better shape than 99% of people. Now, health advice can be really confusing. So one of the reasons I love Dan's stuff is that he cuts through the noise and gets straight to the point. And he said that there were just six main things that we needed to do to get into the top 1% of fitness. Now, for each point, there is a level one which gets you fitter than the average person and into the top 20%. And then there will be a level two which gets you into the top 1% of fitness and ahead, therefore, of 99% of people. Principle number one, the body dashboard. Now, as a business owner, I track a lot of numbers in my business so that we as a team know how we're doing. And these are important things like monthly revenue and expenses, and YouTube views and book sales. When we're in school, we track our exam grades to some degree. And when you have a job, you might have certain performance goals or KPI's that you have to hit. Don't track things in the same way. But according to Dan, the first thing you should do to improve your health and fitness is to build a body dashboard.
Speaker A: So the body dashboard is a set of numbers that's going to inform you of what your health looks like. And you have two sets of body dashboard numbers. You have your surface level numbers and you have your deeper numbers.
Speaker B: Measuring surface level numbers will help you get yourself into the top 20% of people, because you need at least some data to track your health and to make improvements over time. And one of the easiest things I found to do is to just track my weight every day by stepping onto my wifi enabled, Bluetooth enabled smart scales every morning. This randomized control trial that was published in 2020 had different people who were put on a weight loss program. Now, half of these people also weighed themselves up to two times a week, and the other half did not. And these are the results. So you can see that both of the groups lost weight after six months, but the group that weighed themselves lost 4.5 kg more weight overall, which was a significant difference. But something to keep in mind when weighing yourself is that the scales don't differentiate between fat and muscle. So that's why Dan talks about using deeper level body dashboard measurements to get yourself into the top 1% of fitness body dashboard level two.
Speaker A: So, a Dexa scan is one of the most accurate ways to track your body composition, from your lean mass over to how much fat that you actually have.
Speaker B: Now, I actually had my first Dexa scan two years ago on the 17 June 2022, and I've been having DeXA scans about two or three times a year since then. Now, here in London, a Dexa scan costs about 110 pounds, so it's not insanely expensive. And for me, the Dexa scan has been one of the single best things I have ever done for my health, because it just makes the numbers visible.
Speaker A: And with the DeXa scan, we're looking at three things. So, obviously, we're looking at how much body fat you have on your body. That's number one. Number two is we're looking at how much lean mass you have. Now, when I talk about lean mass, it's not necessarily how much muscle you have, because lean mass is a combination of your organ weight, of how much muscle you have, and also how much water you have in your body as well. And the last thing that we're going to be tracking is going to be your visceral adipose tissue or your vats.
Speaker B: Okay? So, visceral adipose tissue. VAT is the fat that lines your organs. It is different to subcutaneous adipose tissue sat under the skin, and it's associated with lots of medical conditions, like diabetes and cancer and heart disease. Now, in my case, I have a pretty strong family history of heart disease. And so when I do my Dexa scans, which I've been doing about every three or four months for the last, like, two years, the visceral adipose tissue is a number that I'm particularly interested in.
Speaker A: And then the last part is going to be your blood work. Blood work. You can look healthy on the outside, but your blood work is going to show you how healthy you are. Really. In general, we want to track cholesterol levels, we want to track insulin, we want to track even. This won't, you won't get this in the blood work, but you will get this from a doctor. You will want to track your blood pressure. And these are the numbers that will inform you of how healthy you are outside of the surface level of just.
Speaker B: Like, looking at you now, Dan recommends, and actually, most athletes and entrepreneurs who really, really, really care about their fitness that I've spoken to also agree with this, that you should be getting your blood work done about every six to twelve months. Crucially, this is not a recommendation for the population level. This is only a recommendation if you care about being in the top 1% of health and fitness. But the most important takeaway here, regardless of whether we want to be average or better than 99% of people, is to start measuring the things that we want to manage and track the changes over time. Another really important habit for being in great shape, though, is meditation, which is where headspace come in. Who are the sponsor of today's video. Headspace, as you've probably heard of by now, is an amazing meditation app that can help you build a daily meditation practice. Whether you need support as you navigate life events or handle daily life, or just become the best version of yourself, Headspace can help you out in lots of different ways. And I've personally worked my way through the introductory course to meditation, which has been really great in my case. The habit I'm trying to build is to do a five to ten minute meditation first thing in the morning before I do my journaling and before I get my coffee. But very excitingly, I've recently collaborated with Headspace, and there is now a feelgood productivity collection, which can help you on the path to building healthy habits to boost your productivity and efficiency. One of my favorite parts of the collection is the section on play. Play is the very first chapter of my book, field of productivity, and it's one of the key sections in the collection as well. And the content in the collection explores how play is the most underrated secret to productivity. How when we can find a way to approach our work in the spirit of play, it boosts our productivity, it boosts our creativity, it reduces our stress, and it also helps us generate more energy, which we can then give to the other important areas of our life. Now, if you wanna see how headspace might be helpful for you, and you wanna check out the feelgood productivity collection, you can try it out completely for free for a whole 60 days. All you have to do is sign up with the link in the video description or scan the QR code on screen. So thank you so much, headspace, for sponsoring this video, and let's get back to it. Principle number two, your movement practice. All right, so when it comes to movement practice, let's start with level one.
Speaker A: I think like one of the simplest things and one of the most underrated exercises that are out there is simply going for a walk outside without your phone. Going for a walk is one of these things that not a lot of people think of as exercise, especially in the society that we live in today. But it's one of the most underrated forms of exercise that you can actually do on your body.
Speaker B: Now, something I learned recently that's really stuck with me is that about ten minutes of walking is around 1000 steps. So since knowing that, I've been very, very much more motivated to get walking. Actually I did this interview with Dan a few weeks ago. And since then, after realizing the importance of walking, my step count on average has just absolutely shot up. Because now each morning I go for a walk, I have my little walking treadmill, walking pad c, two thing under my standing desk. So I'm kind of taking meetings and stuff while walking. I've tried to switch a lot of my Zoom meetings to be walking meetings that I'm just on my Airpods and walking around in the local park. And actually, if I look at what my apple health shows, oh, look at this. I've averaged 20,733 steps a day over the last seven days. Oh, yeah. Anyway, if you walk eight to 10,000 steps a day, that generally gets you into the top 20% of fitness, which is pretty easy to do. But if we want to get into the top 1%, then we need to think about two different types of cardio.
Speaker A: We want to do two types of cardio. One of them is zone two cardio and another one is called HIIT training or high intensity interval training. Now, with zone two cardio, it's what I call conversational cardio. It's the type of cardio that you can do while having a conversation. For a lot of people, this is going to vary. So depending on your cardiovascular levels. For some people, it's going to be walking or walking at a really fast pace, depending on what your cardiovascular level is. For other people, it's going to be jogging, but you really want to be able to do a type of cardio that keeps you at a conversational pace. And you want to do this for anywhere between 150 to 180 minutes per week.
Speaker B: So if we take brisk walking, for example, you could do four pretty fast paced 45 minutes walks four times a week, or you could do a 30 minutes, very light zone two cardio jog around six days a week. And both of these would take you to a total of 180 minutes of zone two cardio per week. I don't do this yet. I've just incorporated the steps into my life. And now I need to start incorporating the zone two because I'm like, ah, you know, I really want to improve my cardiovascular fitness.
Speaker A: Now, the second type of cardio is HIIT training, or what we call high intensity interval training and high intensity interval training. I call it the heavy lifting for the heart. It's what's going to be working your heart at a maximum pace and a maximum rate. And then we want to be doing this at least once a week, anywhere between four to even 15 minutes every single week. And when you have both of these types of cardio in your system, in your routine, what's going to happen is, is that you're going to be increasing this number that we call vo two max, which is the amount of oxygen that your body is able to use at any given time, especially when doing a fitness activity. And when you raise vo two max, that is going to raise your fitness levels. And also that number has also been correlated with living longer, with improved longevity.
Speaker B: So the way that we measure Vo two max properly is pretty intense. I've never done it myself, but it's on my bucket list at some point. So basically, they hook you up to a heart rate monitor and you're wearing a mask that measures the oxygen you inhale and exhale, and you're either running on a treadmill or cycling on a stationary bike. And the intensity of the exercise is increased gradually over time. And apparently this is a really grim thing to do because you're basically exercising until the point where you literally can't do it anymore. And that gives you somehow a measure of your Vo two Max. Now, obviously, this would be the gold standard way to measure Vo two Max, but actually, most of these phones, like Apple Health and stuff, also has a sort of a pseudo Vo two Max measurement on it with, like, cardiovascular fitness. And mine was below average. And then I started walking a lot more and now it's become average, which is very nice. So we can look here that if we look at the last twelve months, I am very below average in terms of cardio fitness level, which is a sort of proxy for Vo two Max. But over the last six months, my cardio fitness has very, very slowly gone up and also I have turned 30. So the average, the average for a 30 year old has gotten down. It's quite a big step change. So now I'm average rather than below average. Basically, I need to work on zone two cardio and doing the HIIT stuff as well, because my cardio fitness kind of sucks. So in terms of actionable recommendations, if you are starting from nothing, your progression might look something like this. Number one, walk for 30 minutes a day. Number two, keep on increasing your steps each week to hit around 8000 steps per day. And at this point, you're probably in the top 20 ish percent of people, or at least above average. Then walk a bit faster or do a light jog to get into your zone two cardio range. But that could also be things like swimming or yoga or pilates or whatever. Instead, and then as the last level up, once a week we want to try doing some sort of high intensity interval training, like sprints on a treadmill or skipping or a spin class or boxing in a group activity. I still need to work on the zone two cardio thing and the hit thing, but that is next on my bucket list. Oh, by the way, if you're interested in more real time updates about my own health journey and stuff, I'm learning and reading and conversations I'm having along the way, you might like to subscribe to Life notes. This is a free email that I send around once a week with notes from what I've been learning and what I've been incorporating into my life, along with favorite books and podcasts and articles and videos and that kind of stuff. It is completely free. You can unsubscribe whenever you want. If you think it's not very good, there'll be a link down below if you want to check it out. Principle number three the strength practice principle.
Speaker A: Number three is lifting weights using progressive overload. Now, depending on what kind of athlete you want to be, it's going to look different for every single sport that you want to get better at. But let's just call it like if you want to get into the top 20% of people, what does that look like? It looks like using just the most basic exercises and just trying to get stronger or trying to increase the amount of volume that you are doing in those exercises.
Speaker B: So if you're starting out as a complete beginner, it can be useful to follow a program to help guide you through the workouts. Jeff Nippard, for example, has a really good beginner program that I was following back before I had a personal trainer. And actually investing in a few sessions with a personal trainer can also be really, really, really helpful. Other than getting a Dexa scan every now and then, hiring a personal trainer has been one of the most ROI, positive expenses in terms of my own, my own health journey, because like on a very basic level, they help teach you like the right form and you can use the weights and stuff appropriately to avoid injury. But really, I use a personal trainer as an accountability mechanism because without a personal trainer, I tend not to show up to the gym. And if I do show up to the gym without a personal trainer, I tend to half ass it, whereas when I have a personal trainer there, they push me. I work hard, I get very sweaty, and then I'm always glad I did it once it's over. Now, based on my own DExa scan results, I am currently above average for the sorts of people that get Dexa scans, which tends to skew sort of more athletic anyway, which is kind of nice. But I'm inching, I'm trying to inch into the top 20%, but if you really apparently want to get into the top 1%, and that's going to be a little bit trickier. So to get into the top 1% of fitness, that's going to the gym more often, probably like three to five times per week, pushing yourself harder by lifting heavier weights and doing more reps and sets and tailoring your workouts to train specific muscle groups. All right, principle number four is the sleep practice. Now, the reality here is that if you don't prioritize your sleep, then you are not going to optimize the other two thirds of your life, because sleep is one of the most important things we can do to improve our health.
Speaker A: When it comes to, say, for a complete beginner, the thing I would say is, at the most basic level is, okay, are you going to sleep? And are you waking up at the same times? Are you getting anywhere between seven to 8 hours of sleep per night? And then if you just look at those things right there, it is going to inform you of whether or not you're getting enough sleep, which is actually one of the most important factors.
Speaker B: Now, we often focus on our sleep quantity, as in how many hours we're sleeping. But what a lot of people don't know is that sleep regularity, as in whether you go to bed and wake up at roughly the same times, is pretty important as well. Now, the sleep stuff is interesting. Like, there's, there's loads of conflicting advice out there. I have a video up there and linked down below where I interviewed Professor Russell Foster, who is a professor of circadian sciences at Oxford University, who's literally studied the circadian rhythm and sleep for his whole life. So if you're interested in more, like, legit, evidence based tips around sleep, you can check out that video. But there is one thing that Dan recommends that I find very useful, called the three two one method.
Speaker A: So 3 hours before you go to sleep, you're not gonna be eating any food, because anytime that you are going to be resting, you don't want to be having to digest anything in your body. And 2 hours before you go to sleep, especially for people who wake up and go pee at night, you don't really wanna be taking in any liquids whatsoever. And 1 hour before you go to sleep, you wanna stay away from screens, because screens have this tendency to make you wake up.
Speaker B: All right, principle number five is the nutrition practice.
Speaker A: We wanna get ourselves to a whole food, single ingredient, nutrient dense diethyde. And usually with like, single ingredient foods, they do have the most nutrients, as opposed to something that you would get that's like hyper processed, like potato chips, or could be even like fries. Like, we want something that is going to be as minimally processed as possible.
Speaker B: Okay, so basically what we want to do is we want to focus on foods that are minimally processed. So what does it look like if a food is ultra processed? So, generally, you can tell a food is ultra processed if it has a lot of ingredients which you wouldn't recognize, like e numbers, and artificial colorings and flavorings, and preservatives and all that kind of stuff. Usually these foods have had a lot of industrial processing. They're in very bright, colorful packaging that makes them very enticing, they're very, very convenient, and they'll keep you coming back for more because they're low in fiber and they are designed to taste incredible, and they're high in things like calories and salt and saturated fat. And maybe it's not that surprising that this paper in 2020 looked at data from 43 studies and concluded that no study reported an association between ultra processed foods and beneficial health outcomes. Instead, most of the studies found dietary ultra processed food exposure associated with at least one adverse health outcome among adults. These included overweight, obesity and cardio, metabolic risks, cancer, type two diabetes and cardiovascular diseases, irritable bowel syndrome, depression and frailty conditions, and all cause mortality. So basically, ultra processed foods are probably bad. But this does not mean that you can never, ever, ever eat ultraprocessed foods.
Speaker A: It's to look at your diet as this ratio, instead of saying like, I think, like, the biggest thing that, that harms people is thinking that they have to be all or nothing with their diet, when in reality it's like you can actually go 80 20 with your diet, where 80% of your calories are coming from whole, single ingredient, nutrient dense foods and 20% of your calories are coming from whatever you want.
Speaker B: If you obsess over trying to be perfect with this, and only trying to eat healthy foods, then you're probably more likely to binge on unhealthy foods at some point. But if you really want to get into the top 1%, then we need to sort of dial down that flexibility a little bit. That 80% becomes more like 90%. And so you eat less of the stuff that is very bad for you. And we also want to try and hit certain goals like protein intake.
Speaker A: You want to eat at least 0.8 to 1 gram of protein per pound of ideal lean mass. Now what does that mean? It means that whatever your ideal body weight is, you want to eat at least 0.8 grams of to 1 gram of protein per that ideal weight.
Speaker B: You know, I'm currently about 74, so I should be aiming for 140 to 160 grams of protein per day, which is a lot more than I initially expected and actually a lot more than I have by default. There's going to be some people that are like, you know, quibble about this because they're like, ah, protein kidneys, like, oh, it's not the minimum guideline requirement and stuff. We are working on a whole video that's going to be fact checked by people who specialize in a protein research as well, to figure out, like what actually is this? But at least from what I can see from my basic understanding of the literature broadly, this recommendation of around 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight seems pretty reasonable, assuming you're trying to build muscle, which is the thing that I'm trying to do right now, and actually something useful that Tim Ferriss recommended way back in his book. The four hour body is 30 grams of protein within 30 minutes of waking up, which for me basically translates to waking up and then going for a walk and then having a protein shake, which gets the protein into my system and generally apparently helps. And then finally, principle number six is the mindset practice. So when it comes to getting into the top 20% of people, a lot of this is about building routines so that the things that we've talked about in this video become habits. Things that we do automatically, like hitting our step goals and working out two to three times per week and incorporating some sort of cardio into our life and eating healthy foods and focusing on our sleep. The more we can make all of this stuff into habits, the more likely we are that our fitness is going to be better than of people.
Speaker A: Anytime that anyone is trying to focus on a specific outcome when it comes to their health, that leads to a lot of anxiety because they don't necessarily have the control over the outcome, but they do have control over the behaviors. And I do find that a lot of people put way too much emphasis on these outcomes, whether it be how much they weigh, the inches or the blood work, whatever. And they don't put enough emphasis on, like, making sure that they're showing up every day, hitting the gym, putting the right foods in their body, and making sure that they are just quantifying the things that matter to them and really.
Speaker B: Having an action bias. And simply just showing up to do the thing is far more important than obsessing over specific outcomes and trying to min max hyper optimize every little measurement. But then being in the top 1% when it comes to the mindset around fitness means turning these routines into rituals where the things that you do for your health become part of your core identity and they have a much deeper meaning in your life.
Speaker A: The people who are the fittest people on the planet, it's not like they feel like they have to push themselves to go to the gym and push themselves to be healthy. It is a part of who they are as people already.
Speaker B: I am currently nowhere near this, but I aspire to get to this level. And a lot of the people who are older than me, who I look up to as having, like, their fitness really dialed in, it really is a part of their identity. And they almost can't get through a day without feeling like they have to do some sort of health thing, because otherwise they realize that they feel really bad and they kind of get kind of sad and all this stuff. I'm sort of aspiring to a healthy mix of that sort of thing, where being a healthy and fit person genuinely becomes part of my identity. So trying to move from, like, I have to go to the gym and like, oh, God, I've got a workout coming up, or to, ah, I'm so looking forward to go to the gym. I love my. I love my time in the gym. I love working out. That is the transition that I'm attempting to make right now. So if anyone is actually fit and has any tips on how to enjoy the fitness stuff a little bit more, please do. Let me know down in the comments. All right, so those are the six key principles that Dan and I talked about when it comes to leveling up your health and fitness to hopefully become fitter than 99% of the population. Although having done a bunch of research for this video and having. Having had that conversation with Dan, I've realized, damn. Getting into top 1% of anything is actually just really, really, really hot and requires you to really make it focus. But if you want to learn more about evidence based ways to improve your sleep. Then you might like to watch this video over here. Thank you so much for watching. And I'll see you hopefully, in the next video. Bye.