If you want to run faster, here's the best advice that you're going to get. Run slower. What you're going to find out more about what that means on today's episode of the movement movement, the podcast for people who want to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy, strong body starting beat first because, you know, those things are your foundation after all. And we break down the propaganda, the methodology that was hard to say.
Sometimes the flat out lies that you've been told about what it takes to run or walk or hike or play or do yoga or cross whatever is you like to do and do it enjoy it, like efficiently, effectively and then I mentioned enjoyably. I know I did that. That's a trick question, but you know, we're going to dive into that. We call this the movement movement because we are creating a movement that involves you and I'll explain that in a second about natural movement, helping people rediscover the natural movement is the obvious, better, healthy choice.
The way we currently think of natural food. I'm Stephen Sashan from zero shoes.com, your host of the movement movement podcast. By the way, that part about the movement that's involving you, where this is a grassroots groundswell kind of thing that's happening is more and more people get hit to natural movement. And so the way you can help is really the obvious things.
Go check out the website www.join the movement movement.com. There's no cost to join. There's no actual thing about joining. Just that's the domain that I found.
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So let's get started. I'm really, really happy to be having this conversation with someone who I started but it's not too long after we started zero shoes. So film, Maffetone is a pleasure to have you. I rarely do this, but I'm doing this for you.
Doctor, Phil Maffetone. I, it is a pleasure having you here. Why don't you tell human beings who you are and what you do. Thank you, Steve.
And it's really, really nice to be with you. Yeah, we started talking right after you launched and I got a pair of those sandals that I had to put together myself. Yeah, which was a treat. What a fun thing.
You know, I'm really bad with instruction. So it took me like a week. But then you had the superpower of knowing how to make your own footwear. Then I could, you know, my triple jump went from, you know, 38 feet to 57.
I mean, what kind of said your, didn't your mortgage rate go down and your kids? Yes. Yes. Yeah.
That's what happened when you made your own shoes. So backing up to who you are, what you do. I mean, look, I got to preface this with when did your first book come out? Because that's when I first found you, you know, I have a really, really good memory for most things.
The first book was probably the early 80s. Yeah. And it might have been, I don't know if it was the heart rate monitoring book. I wrote the first heart rate monitoring book.
OK, that wasn't the one that I got. Keep going because my brain because I get rid of things. The next one, which ended up being like five editions was called In Fitness and In Health. That one, I got that book in the late 80s.
So anyway, so you're the author of In Fitness and Health, but say more about who you are and I'm going to say out until you do. Oh, gosh. Now I got to have a script or something. Precious on.
I don't know. You know, my fear, I've said this before. My fear when I travel is, you know, I pulled up to my seat on the plane and I'm kind of getting my stuff up above and down below. And the guy next to me says, hi, I'm Bob.
I'm an accountant. What do you do? What can you? I mean, here, let me get started.
I wear many hats. Is that true? I'm going to. Well, you're a musician, but that's not what we're talking about.
I'm going to give you one of your hats and I'm not a haberdasher. So and I don't think I've ever gotten to use a word haberdasher or haberdasher. In a sense, before so I feel good about that. I'm impressed.
You know, you do it again. I've never used it. Now it'll be my will sometime during the reference to you. I didn't make it up.
You are one of the world's leading experts on running and especially on training for running long distances. Would that be an accurate statement? Sure. That's good.
You know, when I first began my career, I opened a clinic and I basically combined exercise physiology by a feedback brain and body, by a feedback physiotherapy and diet and nutrition. And then quickly afterwards, I realized I needed to become a coach because people were getting hurt or people were coming in who were hurt and in asking them how they got hurt, I was doing a good history to figure out how they got hurt. I realized that their training is hurting them and it wasn't uncommon for me to say, you know, after they brag about how they work couch potato and then they, you know, they watched the New York City marathon and like, you know, they go to pair of shoes and stuff. And I would say, you know, you would have been better off staying a couch potato.
Look what you've done to yourself. Besides potatoes. Yeah. Yeah.
So they, you know, they were, I was fortunate in that I could fix most of them up, get rid of their injuries. And then suddenly, you know, two, three months later, four months later, they come back with another injury and I say, well, what did you do between then and now? And I realized at that point that I had to intervene. I had to be a partner with them to help with the training process.
Like, you know, I was all about personalization. How can we individualize this therapy? How can we individualize food and the rest of lifestyle? And so I sort of enlisted myself as their coach in this endeavor.
So, you know, you can add coach to my resume if you want, but it's not technically, I'm not the kind of coach that gives a training schedule, just like I'm not the kind of nutrition person who gives diets. I've never done that. And it's hard. People don't understand that.
Oh, you do nutrition. Can you give me a diet? No, I can't. Oh, can I get my training schedule?
No, no. So it's a real reeducation of the world. And at that point, you know, the running boom was booming. And the mentality was no paying no gain.
Right. And the track and field coaches, who you and I know a lot about, were coming over to the endurance world because as they got older and started retiring, they had no way to go. And so they brought with them the mentality of you got to train fast to race. And so it was a tough sell.
All of my stuff. My head, lots of I was called lots of names, even by publications. Really? Like what?
Are there children listening to this? If there are there about to learn something new, so go for it. Just that, you know, when you when you bought the trend, whether it's right or not, is it's a tough thing. It's an anti-social.
It's a, you know, is this guy crazy? Is, you know, where does he come up with this? There's no science behind it. And of course, as the years went on, both the science caught up and I started doing my own science to demonstrate the results.
So, you know, if I could sum it up, it's all common sense because humans have been this way for millions of years. So what's the big deal? Why is it so difficult to understand the concepts? I was literally having that conversation this morning.
It's like human bodies are all the same shape. They all move the same way. And they're optimal ways of doing that. But the thing that's amazing to me or annoying, frustrating, fascinating, you know, pick your choice of words.
I was on a panel discussion with the American College of Sports Medicine. There was a guy from Brooks and a guy from Adidas and when asked, you know, what's the future? Their answer, both of them had the same basic answer, which is personalization. We're going to make something individual for your unique little snowflake life.
And I said, kind of under my breath, you know, you guys are acting like you need one shoe for walking into the bathroom and a different shoe for leaving it left and left and left. It was just, you know, everybody likes the idea that here's a special thing just for me. But we're all the same basic thing when, and in fact, the better we get at that thing, the more alike we become because we find optimal ways of doing things. But we'll get back to that and say, I want to back up.
I just remember, I don't expect that you do this, that you remember this. I'm probably remembering it correctly in my memory, but the way I'm remembering it now is probably good enough. The first conversation we had, I said, you, because there's a couple of counterintuitive things that you've taught since day one. So one that we, I teased at the beginning about running slower and we'll talk about that and relates to heart rate and heart rate variability, which people very much don't understand.
And the other is footwear. From very early on, your recommendation was go get the thinnest, cheapest pair of shoes. You can so that it's not interfering with your feet, the closest thing to barefoot. You can get get, this is decades before the whole barefoot movement kicked in in roughly 2009.
And one of the first things I said to you, and I'll pretend I'm asking you for the first time now, so you can answer again, was do you feel vindicated or frustrated that it took so long for people to catch up with you? Good question. I mean, I feel good. My goal is to help people, you know, and more people are being helped now because of all the folks jumping on the various band wagons.
And so I'm okay with that. And I forgive the people that called me all kinds of bad names, except for a few. And I won't tell you who, but they work at running magazines. And hold on, just to say, not that running magazines are in any way tainted, but one publisher, I won't mention them by name, but it rhymes with Flunners World.
They put out a book called The Complete Guide to Barefoot and Minimalist Running. And I'm not in it. Zero shoes is not in it. And we were the number one seller of minimalist.
I doubt I'm in it. Oh, I haven't looked at the check. So, so yeah, it could not be a less complete guide. And actually, here's an epilogue.
At one point, one of my best friends in college was the president of the company that publishes that stuff. And when he became president, I call him said, you know, how come we're not in the complete guide? And he got back to me, he goes, you didn't pay for advertising, did you? So that's the thing.
And people don't understand that. It's just. So there's another thing you've been saying, and you even wrote a book about it. It's on.
So I have a bunch of books on our Zero shoes, bookshelf or bookcase. And I went before we get into running slow to run fast or any of the other counterintuitive things, one of your other books, 159, which is your idea is about what it would take for someone to run a sub to our marathon, a legit sub to our marathon, like in an actual race, not under the perfect conditions that were set up for a kichoke. But let's just dive into that and just share with people your thoughts about about the possibility of human beings running a sub to and your thoughts about what's happened, you know, with the kichoke race and what Nike was doing with that product that he was wearing. I originally wrote an article called the 159 marathon.
And I think it was 1998. Well, and people, you know, they thought it was a con, you know, a goof kind of one of those goof articles. But okay, fine. And then I wrote another version of it and then a third version of it.
And then eventually thought, geez, this would make a great book and eventually got around the writing it. And when you did that first article, what was the world record? Oh, God, I don't know. So 1998, I want to say 205.
Oh, I was going to say probably closer to 210, maybe a 98, but you know, somewhere in that, I mean, regardless, five minutes or 10 minutes, differences, massive. So I imagine, you know, people were thought you were insane. Yeah. But, you know, all you have to do is connect the dots.
You look back at what happened, way back when you look at how things progressed, and you theorize where we could end up and how could you not do that? And how could you be emotional about it? And I thought, you know, it's not about springs and your shoes or finding the fastest downhill marathon. It's about breakthrough physiology, which was really not breakthrough.
My feeling is it was all about people understanding where we came from as a species and the closer they could get to doing that again in their training, the sooner the two hour mark would be broken. So can you say more about what that entails? A big part of that has to do with fat burning. If we access our body fat, even the leanest of us has enough fat to go hundreds of miles.
So we have unlimited, virtually unlimited fat stores. And if we, the more energy we have, the faster we go, it's like a steam engine, you know, you throw some more coal in the air or wood and like fire gets hot, it makes more steam and the engine goes faster. And by the way, you also conserve your glycogen so that when you get to the last few miles, you could pick up your pace and really, you know, get a whole lot more seconds off your time. So, and then the idea of running with a gate that was natural was a big part of that, because when you start looking at what is weight to in a marathon time, what to choose, bad shoes, duty or gate, they turn bad and how is gate effect, your energy systems and your time, you know, all of that stuff.
It was, there was so many factors. And, you know, it was the program I had developed really well up to that point. And it was just an application of it to the world's best marathoners. And this is what they can do when they push the right buttons.
Well, and one of the points you made in self-serving that, well, I want to say it's self-serving when I bring this up because it's a little departure from what we're doing at Zero Shoes. You also suggested that it would be someone running on an appropriate course in bare feet. Yeah. I mean, I just thought the best way to deal with the foot issue was to be barefoot simple.
And there were people doing that. They weren't getting much press. They were considered strange. And I had run barefoot in high school half the time.
They wouldn't let me. But the simple idea that the human body is more efficient, you know, without gloves on when you're trying to type, it's just common sense. And so, you know, that's where it wasn't. And it was also that, you know, OK, if you're going to be running on a course that could have some dangerous things or, you know, involve some gravel or pebbles.
And OK, you can wear some shoes, some really flat, simple light shoes, but spend a lot of time barefoot while you're training. And of course, while you're hanging around, because the barefoot stayed strengthened your muscles and so that with a healthy foot, you put that into a shoe. And now you're in much better shape than you were before. People forget when a BBP Kil ran the marathon barefoot, what they often overlook is that he was running on cobblestones.
And so, you know, people think that there are certain conditions that are better or worse. Like, that's one of those conditions that people say, well, you can't do that because, you know, cobblestones. And he did totally fine, not my joke is. And then the next Olympics, you know, he ran in shoes and he did not win.
And then after that, he died. So clearly, there's a connection between wearing shoes and dying, seeing someone obvious. Yes. And I've run on cobblestones barefoot and there it's actually a lot of fun.
There's times where you get in just the right spot and you get that little bit of grip and push off. It's a blast. Yeah. I think that's the thing that that's so upside down is most people who've never experienced trying to run barefoot other than like to the mailbox and back, they immediately go to all the imagined things that they think would go wrong.
I mean, why is that people think that the world is just full of broken glass waiting to punch your foot is a mystery to me, even in New York City, where I've walked and run barefoot for dozens and dozens and dozens of miles I never stepped on. Actually, I take it back. I probably did step on some broken glass. Never noticed.
In fact, even crazier. When I was first living in New York City in 1981, my day job, I was a street performer and the gig that I did, I walked on broken glass on my bare feet. Wow. Who knew?
Man, I was down there then. Really? Oh, I should have come by. Are you playing music?
No, I was not. You know, I love the idea of being a musician. I'm a good technician. I picked up a couple of things where I can get competent.
But then I realized the gap between being a technician and a musician is a lot of time and different genetics. That just didn't happen. But sorry, we missed each other in New York. So, so moving back, I mean, I was just saying, people imagine all these unpleasant things that almost never happen, but they forget the pleasant parts that everyone who's done it describes just, you know, nonstop, how great it feels, how light it is, how natural it feels, how wonderful it is, just getting all these different sensations.
Where do you feel connected to the ground? If you're hiking or, you know, on a trail, where you really feel like you're part of the thing instead of just walking over the thing, they don't have that in their brain. Even though all of us have experienced it at some point and remember, but like that's just not where people go after 50 years of wearing big, big pad of shoes. It's a hard sell.
And it was for me in making these recommendations of being barefoot and a lot of the time my recommendations were based on therapeutic reasons. I want you to be barefoot for therapeutic reasons because your body is really screwed up and you need to retrain it. And what we're going to do a number of therapies and one of them is you're going to take your shoes off and start walking outside and, you know, reestablishing this connection between your feet and your brain. There's a previous episode of the podcast that I did with Dr.
Sarah Ridge from BYU that I think I titled it something like the stupidest research in the world, something like that. Because Sarah did research showing that if you just walk in a pair of truly minimalist shoes, which not all shoes that are called minimalist actually are, if you just walk in a pair of minimalist shoes, you build foot muscle strength as much as if you did an actual foot strengthening exercise program. And I said, it's amazing that you had to prove you. What kind of, you know, it's the dumbest science ever that we have to demonstrate what's like you said, such comments.
Yeah, yeah, that was a while ago. When was that? Oh, yeah, I don't do time very well either. So I'm going to say I remember glancing at that because I look at a lot of science and stuff and I zip through all these, you know, because there's so much stuff that comes out.
And so I zip through and if I see something interesting, I read it. And if I don't, if it looks boring, I skip it and I looked at her stuff and I thought, okay, yeah, nice on this part. Right. Great work.
It was great work. And you know, and then the book ended that one is research that actually just came out not too long ago from Dr. Potipass, which was showing the opposite where if you put art support in the shoes of healthy athletes, they get weaker within 12 weeks. Their foot muscle mass gross by like 17% or up to 70%.
And again, you know, not rocket science. You don't move something. It gets weaker. We know those are old ideas.
You know, I've written a lot about this and they're not just related to the feet. Of course. But we're talking about an ankle bandage. We're talking about a knee brace, a low back support.
Anything you put on the body to try to support the joint is going to result in the muscles working less and they literally can get weak. And you know, I just cringe when I'm at a sporting event and seeing these people with, you know, they're all bandaged up like, you know, what do you, this is not a boxing match. And well, that's actually a really interesting point because people don't understand the point of taping up and boxing, which is a whole different game altogether. And we don't need to get it back.
So, so you wrote this very interesting book about running a sub two marathon at a time where that just seemed crazy. And now that Bekhila did it, what thoughts do you have about that race or that race? That's not even a race about that run. Well, I thought it was a scam.
I mean, you know, it was a commercial. I thought it diminished professional running. But what's interesting is it was done. And the fact that it was done is always in the past, the history of sports has always shown a strong connection between when people are doing something, almost doing something, coming close to doing something.
That's when, you know, these big, like when, when banister broke the four minute mile, all of a sudden there were a lot of people doing it. My hunch is there was a lot of people who were, had he not run that race, there was a bunch of other people who would have been the first one to do it. Not that. So I think the fact that I think what happened was someone broke, even though it was, was a scam, someone did it.
Yeah. And now in the minds of the few lead pack runners, you know, there probably a couple of a dozen of them, maybe not so have the ability to run sub two hours at a Berlin marathon or Chicago, where everyone, all the conditions are right. Now it's much more of a reality. So I think you'll see that coming along pretty quick here too.
One of the points that I made about it is his world rettered at Berlin prior to the sub two was two, one 40, I think I'm not remembering exactly, or two, one 50, somewhere in the two, one 40, one 50. He only ran 40 seconds faster, roughly 40 seconds faster. Yeah. So it's like 48 seconds faster to run sub two, which means he was running basically like 4.58 seconds per mile faster to break two, which is not a whole lot.
It's not. And you could say that in that circus event that they had, he didn't really have that good of a race. Right. Yeah.
He should have run a lot faster. But he wasn't and apparently was a little struggle at the end, but, you know, he did it and yeah, I'm very curious to see what happens next. If people really are inspired and we really do start to see those numbers drop, or if people think of it as kind of one off thing and, you know, nothing changes, it'll be interesting. I did like that.
Of course, Nike made it all about the shoes and some number of months ago, Kichou gave his interview and he was saying it wasn't the shoes. It was my legs. And he was really mad about it. I love it when athletes get annoyed by their sponsors.
I have some stories I won't go into. I'm cutting out logos from their shoes and gluing them on their other shoes that they're going to wear in the Olympic, you know? Yeah, I've actually met a couple of people who've done that. Sponsored by one company wearing shoes from another, swapping them and it goes to make it look like it's different.
Yeah. And then people get mad. It's like, I look for that shoe. I couldn't find it.
Oh, it was specially made for me for that race. Especially made. Especially made excuse. Yeah, they sold out of them.
That was what it is. We sold out. Yeah. It actually is an interesting point because a lot of runners are getting shoes made for them, especially.
And then people for whatever reason think, oh, that they got really good in that shoe. I'm going to buy that shoe and what they're buying completely different what that person was wearing. Yeah. So let's back up to where we tees thing about running slow to run fast because this is actually one of the things and heart rate and heart rate variability because this is, I think one of the things where you really have state to claim, if you will, and obviously, one of the early proponents of all of this, I think the only other person that I know of who was talking about doing slower training for speed at all was Lydiard.
And I don't know where you were in relation to that. But when people think of you most often when I'm online, people are talking about heart rate based training, slower training, et cetera. So let's dive into that, shall we? Sure.
I was familiar with Lydiard's work a little bit early on and then I became more familiar and he became a patient of mine. Oh, really. I tried to show him the heart monitor and he was like so averse to it. I finally got an aware and we tested that.
But he was, you know, I said, look, all of what you're doing can be related scientifically with a heart rate. And I would think you'd want that. No, no, no, we don't. You know, I mean, I'm all for letting the brain guide the body, but we are influenced so much in a negative way by society that we just can't do it.
And so for me, the heart monitor was a biofeedback device that would allow people to respond to the environment and adjust their, in this case, training intensity based on the body's need. Can you say a little bit of a simple idea? Can you say a little more about explicitly what you're doing with the heart rate monitor and how people are using that? Well, specifically finding a point in intensity, as your intensity goes up, the body's metabolism changes to adapt to the energy needs.
And as the intensity goes up, we at lower levels of intensity, we burn more fat in a healthy person, we burn more fat and lower amounts of sugar. And that fat burning, that high fat burning is a very healthy thing. But as the intensity goes up, fat burning goes down and sugar burning goes up rather quickly, actually. And now we're no longer burning fat, we're burning a lot of sugar.
So now we're risking tapping, reducing our glycogen storage in training. If your goal is to train with high intensity training, that can work. But if you do it every day, it's a problem. And also you're not burning fat in what started happening.
And I noticed this in the 80s, what began to happen is that the athletes, all athletes who were training at higher levels of intensity were starting to increase body fat. And if you increase body fat, number one, you probably weigh more, which is a problem. But even if you don't, you have chronic inflammation because excess body fat is associated with chronic inflammation. And chronic inflammation means any little tweak that you have of an injury becomes more inflamed.
And you could get a full blown injury because of chronic inflammation due to excess body fat. And so of course, the diet plays a huge role in that. I did a study four years ago, maybe on where I looked at Paul Larson and I looked at the prevalence of excess body fat in the US. And we found that 91% of Americans had excess body fat, a condition called over fat.
And what the data, there was some really good data that had just come out and I jumped on it and I grabbed it and I said, this is really good. And part of that data was that they were looking at the exercise rates and exercise rates were increasing more people were exercising. But at the same time, people were getting more over fat. Interesting.
Which leaves the diet part. And, you know, if we're eating junk food, if we're eating sugar, we're going to store more fat because sugar does a lot of bad things. One of the things it does is it impairs our ability to burn fat, no matter how slow and easy we train. Right.
And number two, it impairs the aerobic system, which is our fat burning engine. And so we have problems. If everything in our life is wonderful, we're eating too much, we're eating junk food, we're eating sugar. We can't be healthy.
So the way people are using the heart rate monitors, bi-feedback devices, basically as a way of measuring an objective measurement of intensity? Yes. And what Michael was, there were two things. One is to train the person in a healthy way, which meant in most cases, training at a lower intensity.
And then that will help them get healthier in addition to being more fit. But also use that same heart rate as a guide to show that we're really doing something, we're really making progress. And that progress comes from the ability to get faster at the same heart rate. Right.
So in the beginning, people say, well, I can't run this slow. How could you run this slow? People are going to laugh at me, you know, I say, well, run at night. And I mean, people, that's a common question.
You know, I'm sure. And they often don't say they're going to look at, they often say, how can I, I can't run this slow? And then I say, I know what you mean, run it. And I, so I want to measure progress.
I don't want to assume that you're getting better in your training and we wait three, four, five months. And then you're going to run your first big race. And we find out that you really haven't done anything. I want to see that you were making progress.
That doesn't have to be weak to weak, but month to month. And that progress in a runner comes as faster cases at the same submax heart rate, what I call the MAF heart rate, which I've measured. So that's a heart rate that provides the best fat burning state. Right.
And it usually ends up being slower based mainly because so many people are over trained. Oh, that's interesting. Same word about that. Well, usually if you're just thinking, I'm going to start running.
You know, I'm walking for six months. I kind of feel like I'm going to start running. OK, get a hard monitor on your start jogging and you'll be able to jog a little bit really slow, which is understandable. But if you're a trained runner and you've been training for a year or two or five or 10 or 20 and, you know, you've run some PRs, but you haven't lately.
You've been injured a fair amount. You're tired a lot. You know, you're and you say, I'm going to start doing this low, hard, great training. You're depressed.
You're running so slow. And this happens in beginners and happens in professional athletes at every pace along the way. I had a podcast with Mark Allen the other day. And he was reminding me how he felt when he first put the heart monitor on.
He and I were running around the track in Southern California back in, I think it was 83 and he was just laughing. He said, yes, this is how slow he was like an eight 20 pace. Right. So this by the way, Mark Allen, you know, world champion triathlete, very accomplished athlete.
And yeah, hey, 20. I mean, that's barely better than walking for him. And when he got out on the road, so you know, he was around nine minute pace. So, so how do you progress to he progressed to five 20?
So that's the point is that you have to find your starting place. If you don't find the starting place, your progress just doesn't come. You make a little progress, but then you fall back and then you try it again. And you know, that's how humans did it in the beginning.
So how do people and part of this will be getting in touch with you and the things that you've done, but I'll ask you anyway. So how do people find that starting pace, that starting heart rate that they're going to use as their baseline? Well, in the beginning, I figured it in clinically in my office, I would do an evaluation. I would do a history.
I would do like a master's two step tests where I'd measure their resting rate and have them do a high intensity running in place or stepping up on a bench for one minute. And then, you know, where does your heart rate go and do all that evaluation? Then I'd go out on a track with them and I would have them jog slow. I'd have a hard monitor on them.
I'd have them jog slow. And I would see how their slowly elevating heart rate affects their gate. And what's interesting is at the low intensity is that gate is really pretty good in a reasonably healthy runner. And as it goes up, as your intensity goes up, as your pace goes up, when you have that switch from high fat burning to lower fat burning and elevating sugar burning, the gate starts to get screwed up.
In what way? So there'd be irregularities, fatigue, you would sense fatigue and you'd start overstrying, depending on how long the person was running. But you know, gain analysis was something I had been doing from my years in school. And so to get out on the track and watch people was pretty simple.
It's easy to see when you're trying to do that. And so what I did was I picked a heart rate that correlated with my physical findings in my office and the heart rate that preceded the onset of irregular gate. And I did that for a couple of years. And I realized that there's got to be a way to just mathematics.
It's got to be a way to do that without going through all this so that people can do it on their own. And I came up with something called the 180 formula, which I tested for years after that. I tested the formula with my evaluation until everything was tweaked and it was correlated quite well. So people can go to my website and look up the 180 formula.
There's a probably in the last two years is a newer version of it that has a little more individual questions. But you have to answer questions about your health, about your fitness. And you can come up with that MAF heart rate, which is your max heart rate for you to train aerobically. And then you want to attend a range that's your zone.
And that's where you want to train for a period of three, four, five, six months, sometimes doing no speed work. Interesting. And to reiterate, and what happens after you've done that is then how much are people working at picking up their pace at that same heart rate or just finding that they're picking up their pace at that same time. My focus with them is to relax.
Just relax. It's almost like a meditation. You're out there. It's quiet.
You don't have people talking to you. You're not competing with your training partners. Just relax and let you really have to let your brain do the work. Just take the edge off the intensity.
And in some cases, it's a big edge. But whatever your body needs. And as time goes on, after the first month, you should see a noticeable improvement in your pace. Certainly after two months, you should have a measurable change.
You might be running 30, 45 seconds faster after two months. And I have something called the MAF test where you go to the track and that would GPS is easier on the road. If you have a fairly flat road, you'll see that change from week to week. And then you know you're doing the right thing.
And if it doesn't change, something is wrong. And that's something is either you lied about the MAF formula and I've had some crazy the things people do. So if you have this problem and if you have that problem and if you're on medication, you have to do this, not that because there's a health issue. I want to come back to that a second because I have another thought possibly.
But what I love about what you're talking about, there's a certain irony. The irony is something we mentioned before where everyone likes to think of themselves as their own little unique snowflake. But when they're looking to do training, they want to have something that is just laid out linearly. I just paint by number step by step rather than recognizing they are unique little snowflake.
And it's going to be different every day. And you're becoming your own coach rather than relying on some external thing that has no relationship to reality at that time. Following the schedule, blindly following the schedule. I have one schedule for, you know, you want to run a festival marathon, do this for three weeks and you run your fest.
You know, that happens to be on the headline of that magazine. Well, Flunner's World. Yes. Yeah.
My one other potential explanation, there are some guys in the UK who have done some genetic testing. And one of the things that, again, human beings don't like is, especially people in the West, is thinking that there are limitations, not only for humans in general, but for themselves in particular. And so we know that there are some people who respond differently to different kinds of stimulus. And these guys in the UK identified, I think there's 11 different genetic markers.
And depending on what, like eight to nine of them show, you may be a VO2 max non-responder. You may not have the ability to improve your ability to use oxygen efficiently and arguably, possibly, you know, not be getting results by doing slower training. Now, the number of people who are in this situation, it's a very small percentage. I am one of them, it turns out.
And now, not surprisingly, I gravitate and always have towards sprinting. I never gravitated towards distance running at any speed. I don't even like walking the long distances, not interesting to me. But now I know having said that, there are people who will use that as an excuse.
I'm a VO2 max non-responder, which unless you get tested, you don't know that. But it is an interesting thing that there are these individual differences. One of my favorite things about track and field and master's track in particular is that you eventually have to come to a conclusion about yourself, which is what's the thing I'm good at. Am I good at my 50 meter, 100 meter runner?
Am I 200 meter? Like, I don't even run the 200. I'm not a good 200 meter runner. 100 meters, like 50, 60, I'm great.
100, I'm okay. 200, not my race. Anything longer? I can't do that.
Not my thing. And there's people who are on the exact opposite end of the spectrum. Yeah. Well, you know, we're a theory that we are always as good as our peers.
And so if you want to know what you're good at, if you get enough things when you were younger, you're good at the same things today relative to your age group. You know what's fascinating about that? No, you don't. I'll tell you.
Well, we had a lot of money. I got a lot of money when we started in junior high school and one of my two closest friends, who also started gymnastics with me, his dad had a major video, a major film, of us from the day we started until the day six years later, we were graduating high school. And from day one, we were all sort of ranked. I was the best, then Jim then rich, and we got significantly better over the next six years, but you would never be confused about who was who, and we stayed in that same ranking if you will.
We just improved what we already had inherent in who we were. And then in my 40s, I discovered something that my mother didn't know, which is that her No one ever knew that. I mean, he did that, of course. Yeah, a quick note about the gene thing.
People use genes as an excuse. Oh, my grandparents were obese or they were alcoholic, so I guess I'm going to be an out. So there's something called the expression of these genes. In most cases, if you have the gene, it doesn't mean you're going to be whatever.
It has to express itself and what expresses genes, but our lifestyle, especially the foods we eat. Genes can be expressed after a meal. So this is really, really important. People need to get off the genetic bandwagon.
It's a balance, I think, between recognizing the impact of your genetic history and recognizing where you can or can't take that. I watched a very interesting video recently just talking about steroids and how many people think, oh, if you just take steroids, you become huge or whatever it is. Like, no, not so simple. Here's some people who've taken steroids who were non-responders, and here's some people who took tiny bits of steroids and just blew up because they totally responded.
And this is one coach actually. He said, if you're going to do a steroid cycle, the first cycle you do, that will tell you everything about your potential. Yeah. Very clever.
I've never heard any talking about that. But yeah, that balance between recognizing the who you are, but the boundaries that that that gives you are pretty wide. They're very wide. And there's a couple of issues.
One is, and I wrote a scientific paper on this, we need to not just be fit, but we need to be healthy. And there's so many athletes who are fit, but unhealthy. They retire early because they're so broken down. They never reach their athletic potential.
And the athletic potential issue is such that, I mean, you could take almost anybody out there and improve their athletic potential and have them run PRs, you know, relatively short period of time. There's also, there's another thing that's happened over the years that I think affects people's perception about what's possible for themselves or anyone. And it's just the number of people and the availability of information about people who are doing some activity. Again, I'm thinking about gymnastics.
I vividly remember being in a stadium watching Nick Landrynoff who, when he did the first triple back flip off High Bar, I mean, it was, he missed the first two, then he did the third one. We actually had on that eight millimeter film. And you know, it was the most amazing thing you've ever seen. There's high school kids who do it now.
You know, there's strength moves that no one could do in the eighties. High school kids do it now. And so, and with running, there's so many more people running. The population of people doing this thing is so much bigger.
There's more people doing more amazing things, which skiers your perception about, you know, what's possible on who to do right. Yeah. Yeah. And that, you know, the other thing, and this is important for professional athletes in particular, but it's important for everybody.
And it's that it's all about you. Don't go into this race thinking about who's here and the disguise. You know, think about you. And man, that sometimes breaks the mold and releases people's abilities because they remove the stress from their life and they run their own race.
Even in a hundred meters, it took me years to learn to ignore the guy who's either shoulder or eye was on or vice versa. And it's very hard when there's someone, when you hear someone catching up to you, it's very hard. Yeah. I mean, your gates change.
Yeah. Because you're sensing that. And you see it in a longer race where there's enough time to do it, even in a mile. But certainly in a marathon, you watch that lead pack.
Yeah. You see all these people and I try and I play this game to see who are they keying off. And then if he changes his stride, are they how long does it take for them to change it? You know, it's really fascinating to see how that works.
That's so interesting. Do you think that's just sort of like a mirroring imprinting thing or is it a little? That's exactly what it is. Yes.
Mirror neurons in the brain. If I'm doing this right now, your brain is contracting the muscles that I'm using to lift my arm. Your brain is literally there. It's contracting them.
You're not moving yet, but the action is there. It is kind of funny again, thinking of things that are common sense. So we only discovered mirror neurons and they're not too distant past yet. We've had the phrase monkey see monkey do for a very long time.
Yes. Yes. We're just, you know, hairless monkeys. Yeah.
And we've been a lot of clinical things. Also, we've had the benefits of motor neurons and there's a lot more complexity to that system. But the benefits we've used in mental imagery and have done so for decades, you know, the high diver who gets up and stands there and closes as I imagine the activity, which he spent hours and hours and hours working on with video. And likewise, I just wrote an article.
I don't know if it came out, but called imagination injuries or something like that, where I talked about when I was in practice. And my practice was in Westchester County. So I was near New York City and near Boston. So the marathon in New York and Boston were like, there was always a big buzz in the running community.
And my, the article talks about what happens when we watch these races back then on the TV. And we think, God, I could run that way. And the next day you go out and you overstride like a canyon or whoever was on the lead and then they come hobbling into my office and I asked them how it got hurt, when did it, you know, and I traced it back to them having this image that had nothing to do with their body, but they were going to try it. This is something that I say all the time when people, especially when someone says they're comparing themselves to some Olympic marathoner, I don't want to point out the obvious, but you're 105 pound Canyon.
I mean, maybe it's just me, but you're like 205 pound. I say this is five foot two hundred. Yes. This is our society.
We have a six society and one of the sicknesses is that we instilled this stuff in people in kids at young ages and they're allowed to grow up with these ridiculous ideas that are just for fault. Well, anyone can become anything. Yes. Others like to say that and it's not untrue, but that doesn't mean you could run a 201 marathon.
There's a local Olympian whose name is not coming into my brain right now, but hopefully will buy the end of the story and a big panel discussion. Someone asked him, you know, how do you coach kids to become, you know, the super fast runners that you have? He goes, what? And he'll ask me again.
He goes, no, no, I go to the elementary school and I look for the fastest kids and those are the ones that I could. It's like, got it. It's very Russian of him, even though he's not Russian, but that's the thing. It's like, again, we have a bigger population to draw from.
You start finding the genetic Greeks. Well, that's yeah. And I shriek when somebody says, well, my kids graduating high school, he's got a scholarship at this university and he's kind of seeing this coach so and so. And I just there's a coach there.
There attitude is, you know, get up on you guys, run them into the ground. Whoever's left, that's your team. Yeah. There's a coach who will remain named, let's who might know.
And I've been on the track with him and his athletes and that is exactly how he coaches. It's like, we'll beat him all up and whoever, you know, last man standing wins. And there's a lot of people who could have had very promising careers that were cut short. I think actually back in my gymnast days in college, I knew these two women who were trained by their mother and father.
They only trained three days a week. They were national champions. And then they got to college and they were training five days a week. Now, when they were only training three days a week, never had an injury.
Five days a week, constantly injured. Well, again, look at Roger Banister. I mean, if you look at his his workout ethic, you know, what was he doing? He wasn't even training.
Yeah. He was a full time medical student at the same time. Talk about stress. Right.
Yeah. Definitely the thing. So I want to bring this into the finish line, if you will. Is there anything that we sort of missed and just, you know, the things that you've experienced, the things that you discovered and how they either have or haven't yet caught up to the way you've been thinking?
I'm sure there are a lot of things. I'm really good to have one dude. Music in the brain. You know, so I'm amazed that people don't know that our brain is important in sports.
What context? And so that's it. In all contexts. This is where it comes from here.
It starts here. And if we don't have a healthy brain, we can't have a healthy body that moves properly. So that is, of course, the brain is 60, 65% fat. And if you don't have healthy fats in the brain, it's not going to work right.
So I could leave you with that. Well, let's tease with that. Let's use that as an excuse for you telling people how they can get in touch with you and your work and find out more. And so we've touched on the running part of things.
We haven't talked on brain and diet so much. But I know that that's a big chunk of what you're doing. So people can find out when they find you. So how can they do that?
They can go to my website. I'm told there's more than 400 articles about this kind of stuff. And it's all free. My website is film, Aftaton.com.
And that's just for those of you who I always love it. Like on NPR when they say, we're sponsored by someone. So they give a domain name. It's impossible spell because you have no idea what that is.
So pHilmafet.com. That's great. I got to use you for my marketing. And if you want to, I'm putting some playlists together.
I've broken down. I haven't given in. I've just broken down to create some playlists for exercise. And I've always wanted people to not listen to music when they exercise.
I've always wanted them to listen to their bodies. That's what the brain is for. I'm going to listen to my body. Oh, there's this little thing.
I wonder why that is. Oh, if I slow down, it gets better. But we did a survey and we found 80% of the people who were listening to music when they ran. Or biked.
And that was a little depressing. And I just thought, OK, so we've got these great earbud, heart rate technology gadgets for people who don't like chest reps. The sound is incredible. And unfortunately, you can also talk on the phone, which is the worst thing to do when you're working out.
But if you have to listen to music, listen to math music. That's my tagline. I think from my music website. My music website has all eight of my albums and some singles and it's MaffetoneMusic.com.
And you can download the music for free there and make playlists or use the ones I have. And it will be slow and easy in the beginning. So you warm up and slow and easy at the end. So you cool down and whatever it is in the middle.
I like it. And I think giving it away for free, you'll make millions of dollars in volume. That's the way it works. Without a doubt.
I mean, playing my stuff on all the, I didn't realize until the other day, there's like 150 online streaming companies. I'm on all of them. And so please play them because I make about a half a penny every time you play a song. So I got to check it, you know, for $30 every month or something.
I, from some acting things I did 40 years ago, for years I was getting checks for $1.05, $1.10, it was brilliant. So Phil, total, total pleasure, as always. And for everyone who's here, if you have any questions, obviously can throw them in as comments or you can just ask Phil directly via his website. I just want to thank you all for being here.
Part of the movement movement, the podcast for people who want to learn the truth about natural movement. And again, go to www.jointhemovementmovement.com for previous episodes to like and share and thumbs up and leave comments and subscribe to find out about upcoming episodes and all those things that you know how to do. I don't need to explain it to you. But most importantly, just go out, have fun and live life-y first.