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#005 - The Mindful Mover
220 Plays2 years ago
Philip Chubb from "The Mindful Mover" joins me in this episode to tackle one of the most common obstacles between the present day and a healthier, fitter, stronger you - TIME.
Time or lack thereof is a common reason why people do not train. . Daily life is filled with activities that drain our time leaving little room for much else, and so the sport or fitness activities are amongst the first things to go. Trying to balance work life with home life, along with the responsibilities each of those bring with kids, pets, chores etc is no easy feat. But what if there was a way to get fitter and stronger WITHOUT needing the gym 5 days a week?
In this episode, Phil talks me through why training for multiple hours a day may not be the most effective strategy, how you can get strong with only 6 main movements and a small time investment, his time in the movement culture and much more.
You can find more about The Mindful Mover here:
Instagram: @the_mindful_mover
Website: https://mindfulmover.com/
YouTube: @mindfulmover
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Transcript
Introduction to Efficient Training Methods
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello and welcome back to perspectives. Today's guest is the mindful mover. Philip, along with his wife Martina, run online coaching, how to get around arguably the biggest obstacle when it comes to training, time. Time, or lack thereof, is a common reason why people don't train, balancing work life with home life, along with the responsibilities each of those bring. Daily life is filled with activities that leave little room for much else.
00:00:29
Speaker
But what if there was a way to improve your fitness without spending catnax hours in the gym? In this episode, Phil talks me through why multiple training sessions throughout the week may not be the most effective strategy, how you can get strong with only six main movements, why more isn't always better, how to get started in as little as one session per week, and much more.
Strength Through Calisthenics vs. Traditional Splits
00:00:52
Speaker
I've been following The Mindful Mover for a number of years and experienced some benefit from the style of training myself. And if you're someone who finds it difficult to commit time to multiple gym sessions a week, this is the episode for you. So without further ado, The Mindful Mover.
00:01:35
Speaker
All right, so Philip Chubb, it's really, really good to have you on the podcast. I have been following you for a number of years and I really, really like your approach to training as I think it addresses perhaps the most prominent reason as to why people don't train and that is the element of time.
Calisthenics Advantages for Upper Body Strength
00:01:55
Speaker
So for the listeners who are not really familiar with your work, how would you describe what you do?
00:02:03
Speaker
So I would describe it as just like you said, the number one limiting factor for many people being time. We try to find out how we can get around that by helping people to train in limited amounts of time, but still making a lot of gains for the time they spend training. So small time investment for big gains. That's our whole idea.
00:02:24
Speaker
Okay, and in what sort of area of fitness would you say you fall under? Because I know there's different, there's a lot of different areas of sort of fitness and when you talk about gains there, what specifically are you referring to? So we tend to use a mixture of calisthenics for the upper body, working towards things like planche push-ups, handstand push-ups, one arm channels, front lever rows, because we find that those are the best strength gains.
00:02:51
Speaker
or that's the best tool for upper body strength gains. When you make gains on those movements, you find that all the other movements out there, like maybe your bench press, overhead press, all those other things will be increasing in the background. So it kind of fits our whole model of small time investment for a lot of gains.
00:03:10
Speaker
On the other hand, for the lower body, we find that weight training tends to be more effective, especially in the long term. So for the lower body, we use things like weighted squats, split squats, things with barbells, etc. Okay, so not traditional sort of bodybuilding bro splits, as we as we like to call them, but slightly, slightly different and a slightly unique take on it. So
00:03:34
Speaker
Can you talk me through your fitness journey and sort of how you arrived at this sort of this idea and this sort of style of training?
Philip's Journey to Efficient Training
00:03:43
Speaker
Absolutely. So when I first got into training, it was about middle school. So I, you know, kind of read a book and it talked about how to exercise for improving one's health and everything, right?
00:03:57
Speaker
And so my workout was kind of just something like, I'll do a few push-ups and like, you know, 100 sit-ups every day. And that's where it started off. But over time, it started learning more and more and more. I got into break dancing at one point with some of my friends. And one of them told me, hey, you know, man, you'd be great at planches. We should look that up.
00:04:20
Speaker
So I looked up what a planche was and from there I got involved in gymnastic based training as well as a group called the movement culture. So when I learned about that kind of a gymnastic based training and the movement type training, well that like piqued my interest. So from there I started training a lot. That was a funny phase in my life. At one point I was training like
00:04:45
Speaker
six days a week with an active rest on the seventh day twice a day uh four hours right yeah yeah oh some of those days are like eight to ten hours not just strange training but like yes
00:05:02
Speaker
I did that for most of my late teens in my 20s. And that wasn't sustainable, obviously, it's long term. But that's where I started and went for a while. Later, basically, when I realized that that wasn't going to be sustainable.
00:05:18
Speaker
I started trying to figure out, okay, how can we go the opposite route? How can we make it so that actually we can train and gain without spending all day in the gym? And how can we make it so that everyone can do this? Because a lot of people don't have eight to 10 hours a day to train. So that's where the path went there.
00:05:36
Speaker
Okay, I learned of a new concept the other day called allostatic load and I like buzzwords so I want to throw that in there to sound like I know what I'm talking about. So when you talk about you were training sort of eight to ten hours per day for sort of six days a week and then with an active rest day you sort of had in air quotations there because
00:06:00
Speaker
Yeah, it doesn't sound like it was too, too restful. Do you find you were like suffering from burnout quite a lot? What was the impact of training for that sort of amount of time and the volume you were doing?
00:06:13
Speaker
Yeah, you know, I definitely had some issues there that in hindsight I can see were from training so much. Like, for example, one thing I had was constant overuse injuries. You know, wrists were hurt, knees were hurt. And it was funny because during that time I was doing all of these prehab and injury prevention exercises and I was basically like, I'm going to be indestructible. Nothing will hurt me.
00:06:39
Speaker
Except for some reason, I'm always injured. But I would always rationalize that, well, I would be more injured if I wasn't training. And that was the thing. So on the physical side, I had those problems. And on the more internal, the health side, I was noticing, you know, I would have trouble sleeping, I had the insomnia, I'd be awake for hours per night.
00:07:04
Speaker
And I never really thought about that being like correlated possibly with my training. It was always like those things were just something like, no, a side thing. But later actually ended up realizing like, oh, that was that aesthetic load that you said was a bit too heavy to carry the whole time.
Lessons from Overtraining: Finding Balance
00:07:24
Speaker
Yeah, so just to sort of touch base on what that is and the allostatic load, I believe someone explained to me the other day is the kind of threshold at which you can kind of take stress in terms of be that physiological stress on the body through training or work related stress or something, you know, all the different stressing factors in your life. And I believe that allostatic load refers to that threshold where once you go above it, you kind of suffer that burnout phase and things like that.
00:07:54
Speaker
In terms of your sessions then, so you were saying you were training for that amount of time. I learned about the sort of RPE scale as well, or the rate of a perceived exertion from Michelle Vanda-Vento, who was a triathlete we had on a few episodes ago. And she was saying that's not really something you can measure, but in terms of the intensity of these workouts,
00:08:15
Speaker
where would they sit on that rp level do you think there were you know were they really really intense sessions or do you think they were just kind of like eight to ten hours of yeah it was doing quite a lot of movement maybe there was some high you know high intensity in there or was it all just like full on super hard training
00:08:31
Speaker
Oh, that's a good one. Yeah. The part of that training each day at one point was like twice a day of strength training. So that was high intensity. I wouldn't say it's a 10 out of 10. If I had to rate it, it'd be like, no, maybe seven, eight, that kind of area. So it was intense enough to be something that I needed to recover from for sure.
00:08:53
Speaker
but surrounding those times were also other points with movement and those would often be somewhat lighter but you know it still kind of ends up adding up especially depending on the movement so when we were you know just doing some flow work on the ground it might stay pretty light that's fine but then when we're doing tumbling
00:09:17
Speaker
into grass and doing like hard landings and everything.
Exploring Movement Culture
00:09:21
Speaker
Even though it's movement, those impacts, they still hurt. They add up. Goodbye. Goodbye kneecaps. Yeah. Knees, ankles. Oh my goodness. When one bad landing, out, you know. So it was definitely the train train part would be like, you know, seven, eight. And the moving part maybe could have been like anywhere down from like, no, three, four, maybe as low as two. But it could go higher, too, depending on what movement we were doing. It was a lot.
00:09:46
Speaker
but that's okay though because you did like four hours of pre-hab work and yeah just till it made everything fine if I was just four hours of pre-hab okay I first heard about the movement culture through Edo Portal so quite a prominent figure so if anyone hasn't heard of it the movement culture it's probably better to let you explain what the movement culture is in your own words really rather than let me let me define it but yeah what would you say the movement culture is to you
00:10:15
Speaker
So when I first started getting involved in it, it was kind of that they were really into checking out different forms of human movement. So they'd be doing the gymnastics, they'd be doing the dance work, they'd be doing the hand balancing. And it was just all about finding different movements and exploring all of them, which I really, really liked.
00:10:37
Speaker
It was also a lot. There was a big element of you know, French training involved in it It's like another coaching there would involve a lot of working on astrology massive base stuff for the upper body Weights for lower body. So it kind of was a good Inspiration in terms of like how we ended developing our own methodology but it was a lot of training at that time like anyone who's been in it knows it's like it's a
00:11:07
Speaker
they turned into a lifestyle. It's a lot of work and it was not something that I found to be a long-term sustainable thing because of just how much volume went into all of that training. It was a lot.
00:11:22
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, I can understand. So yeah, as mentioned about that Edo Portale, I first saw the, there was a YouTube channel, I think it was called like the Art of Strength or something. I think it was Calisthenics channel, all these guys in the States just doing some, some pretty impressive stuff. And they did like this really, really nice and well put together. You know, the editing on it was really cool of Edo Portale doing these
00:11:47
Speaker
Handstands and these like animal flows and it just looked super cool. So I I got quite interested in it I wouldn't say I was particularly involved in it But I you know was an impressionable teenager at that stage and you know took away like yeah, you know I always like to do something a little bit different so I started training and you know taking some elements of that training away as well as doing you know hanging work and I
00:12:10
Speaker
When I went to uni actually I did some hand balancing and that's served me well actually. That's always a good pie trick to whip out is the hand-standing stuff. So Edo, I saw he did a bit of work with Conor McGregor as well at one point. So perhaps that's kind of after that point it seemed to really grow this whole idea of movement and getting a wider platform for people to understand what it was.
00:12:39
Speaker
you know there was videos of Connor doing some you know balancing like tennis balls on his head or like punching these tennis balls against the wall and walking along rails and things like that and it did look uh you know and you know obviously if Connor McGregor was doing it then it must be good
00:13:00
Speaker
That's such a funny thing in sports. You know, I talked about that because I used to be involved in a lot of these different sports and everything. You talk to people and it's just like whatever the top person is doing, that's the best thing to do. It's so funny how like sometimes we might forget that they just are successful because they're the best, you know.
00:13:24
Speaker
You try to tell me that if I don't like punch a tennis ball against the wall 5,000 times a day you telling me I'm not gonna win the UFC That's the only have to do if you just do that on it will not be enough it has to be
00:13:41
Speaker
It's never enough. So just go back to that point then. I see that obviously off the back of that sort of influence and things like that. I did see a real emergence of things like these animal style walks and floats. You
Making Training Enjoyable
00:13:56
Speaker
saw the elephant walks and if anyone who doesn't know what they are, it's probably better to Google what they look like rather than
00:14:05
Speaker
try and explain it on a podcast, but there was the lizard flows, there was the animal walks and crab walk and whatever different walk you can think of that was probably involved at some point. Do you think there's any merit in using any of those in your training at all? Or do you think it's just quite good and quite fun to do as a method of training, if you like?
00:14:29
Speaker
Yeah, I think, you know, if you enjoy that sort of thing, there's nothing wrong with it. Like if it's just for the sake of you enjoy it, you're having fun, it's a good workout. There's nothing wrong with that.
00:14:42
Speaker
The question I think that sometimes can come up is things like, no, are these things needed? Sometimes things go from I enjoy this kind of workout and it's fun. Then you start reading that article where it talks about this is the thing that we're missing in fitness. And if you don't have it, then you're missing something. So that really gets to that point. Now we're talking about a whole different thing. Before it was enjoyable. Now it's like something that we have to do or we're somehow deficient.
00:15:10
Speaker
I don't really subscribe to that belief or that thought at all. If you like doing like the flows and everything, no problem, enjoy. But if you don't ever flow on the ground in that way, I think
00:15:23
Speaker
plenty of people have somehow I don't know how but they'd made it through life without floating on the ground like that and been totally fine it was mostly fine right yeah 100% and I think the idea of fun actually is really overlooked in training I think often times people think that training has to be this super super serious endeavor every time you go in the gym you have to put that
00:15:49
Speaker
you know that sigma male music on and in those those heavy beats or that heavy metal and just you know go at it really hard but you know i i think there's loads of elements of training that can be you can get loads of benefits from just having a bit of fun you know climb a tree in the garden when was the last time most of us as adults actually climbed a tree without people frowning at us and wondering what
00:16:15
Speaker
But these things like these flows and hand balancing and everything like that, you don't see much of it incorporated into training. And I think training should be a bit of fun as well. What's your thoughts?
00:16:30
Speaker
I fully agree. I think if it's not a fun thing, if you just are doing it for the sake of being strict and I had to do this at this time, this way, every single time for the rest of your life, it's going to be just absolutely miserable. And that's if you continue it in the first place. We have to find joy and know what our bodies can do for it to be a long-term thing, I think.
00:16:52
Speaker
You see those sports athletes, they're able to do it for the sake of work, but then as soon as they're done their sport, they'll leave it and they'll never pick it back up again. If you ask them about it, they'll be like, I don't want to do it. I don't want to touch that. So I think I agree with you. I think it has to be some element of fun to make it enjoyable. Why would we want to work out for the rest of our lives and just hate it the entire time? That's a lot of time spent training that we don't like.
00:17:18
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. And I think there's this idea of subscribing to perfect form and everything all the time as well. And, you know, in my opinion, I don't think, you know, I'm by no means an expert. I'm literally just an amateur who enjoys training and, you know, pushing my body in different ways and, you know, I'm by no means the fittest or the strongest, but I quite enjoy exploring different things and seeing a lot of fun and what I can make my body do.
00:17:44
Speaker
but there's another coach i sort of follow quite closely and he he does a lot of sort of uh carries and things like that that are not even so he'll carry you know 20 kilos in one hand and 60 in another or something like that because
00:18:01
Speaker
he's of the idea of the sort of opinion that you don't do everything with a perfect form all the time if you're reaching up to grab something off a top shelf you're not going to be you're not going to be setting yourself and you know retracting your scapula to make sure you've got the perfect base to be able to do it the same with like picking
Imperfect Form and Progressive Overload
00:18:20
Speaker
stuff off the floor it's always it's always a bit of a laughing uh an ongoing joke when you get to these sort of corporate jobs when they give you health
00:18:28
Speaker
training videos of how to pick up a box and things like that and bend down and keep your back straight and make sure you're lifting with your knees and things like that. But the reality is that people don't really do that all the time. No matter how careful you can be, there are going to be times where you put your body in a position where it's not going to be perfect. And what do you think about that sort of thing and about having
00:18:52
Speaker
Obviously your your sort of training style seems to be having a carryover to different areas of life and things like that
00:18:59
Speaker
When it comes to form, I kind of have maybe like two main thoughts. One is that we actually say that form can be a form of progressive overlook. So, you know, today, you know, if you are trying to do a planche, you know, of course, we can look it up, but it's basically a position with your feet in the air.
00:19:23
Speaker
Now, if your hips are a little bit too low on the planche, or they're a little bit too high on your planche, well, you don't have to say, okay, I can't do a planche with perfect form, so I need to go back and do something else. You can use that planche layer and say, all right, you know what, my form today is a little bit not perfect.
00:19:43
Speaker
But next workout, let's see if my form improves. And if the form improves and congratulations, you progressively overload. You got stronger. So we try to help people see that form can be a way to improve. Now, of course, the disclaimer is that there are certain forms that are just like, you know, not good at all. Like if you're doing a planche and the arms are supposed to be locked for the planche, but your arms are bent, then now you're going to have a problem. So that is something that's like go back and correct.
00:20:12
Speaker
But if the hips are too high or the hips are too low, the shoulders aren't perfectly protracted, you know, or set properly, it's OK. They can over time improve. Now, the second point I would say is that sometimes people can easily get caught up so much in the form that they forget what they're actually exercising for in the first place. Yeah. Yeah.
00:20:36
Speaker
Yeah, you might see this happen a lot with like weight lifters, and I think our weightlifting, I should say, like, snatch spinnings are powerful power snatch, and sprinting, for example, you know, the person at the Olympics,
00:20:51
Speaker
They have to keep that bar, you know, that one extra millimeter closer or further away during their snatch of clean and jerk because that's the difference between them winning gold medal and getting to feed their families for that, you know, that Olympic cycle or getting silver and just being cast off.
00:21:10
Speaker
Or in sprinting they know the perfect arm swing that is important because that's the difference between like half a second more and half a second less and being you know you same ball or the person came after you same ball who you know, we're not I'm not sure who that is, but you get the idea and But that's not the same thing that we need to do for as actual trainees like when I go out to sprint I'm just doing some hard gains and some cardio and
00:21:38
Speaker
I've seen your sprinting vignette, so... I talk about it all the time. I'm like, my sprint form is total hot garbage. You know, it's not good at all. But it doesn't matter, does it? I'm not ever going to get to race these same bull, and at least not seriously, not for a gold medal. And on the day that I do, that's when I'll hire a coach to help me with my sprint form. But until that day, it's just like, I don't care, you know?
00:22:03
Speaker
Yeah, I heard a good quote about perfectionism and things like this as well, which I think obviously perfect form. I think it was Chris Williamson, he does a quite a well-known podcast now, and he said that perfectionism is procrastination masquerading as quality control.
00:22:24
Speaker
I think it was that's pretty nail on the head there in terms of if I don't have the the perfect form then I'm like oh wow do I really do it or now I'm obviously not good enough to do it so why bother at all sort of thing I love that I love that it's like oh it's just almost like another excuse to like go back and focus on anything but the actual movement that's a wonderful quote I like that
00:22:51
Speaker
It is, it is good.
The 'Big Six' Movements
00:22:52
Speaker
So talk to me about, considering what you've learned, you've coined this term of the Big Five in terms of exercise and things like that. Can you tell us your sort of philosophy around the Big Five and also talk to us a bit about the sort of accommodating resistance element as well? Absolutely. So our Big Five, I said actually, no, funny place to announce it, but it's actually kind of our Big Six now, we added the North Lake Pearl.
00:23:15
Speaker
but it's six movements now that we find give a lot of carry over to everything else. So those movements are the plants push up, the handstand push up, the one arm chin up, the front lever row, the squat,
00:23:31
Speaker
and the nordic lycra and we find that if you work on those six movements and you know people oftentimes say like oh i can't do a plenish bishop yet there's progressions for each of them so no progressions towards them and those six movements
00:23:48
Speaker
then you find that you make gains on all the other movements. So, for example weighted dips were not on that list. But if someone is working and progressing on that big six movements, then they will find that their weighted dips will likely go up in the background for free.
00:24:06
Speaker
Same thing with like maybe the overhead press. I'm going to be doing overhead press, but it goes up for free. Same thing with the bench press or an awaited chin-ups. And the whole idea with these movements is if you work on these six movements, you're gaining in everything else without having actually trained everything else. That's kind of the whole idea.
00:24:24
Speaker
bang for your buck effectively yes yes mm-hmm I've had a I've had a bit of first-hand experience at trying some of these it was a few years ago now and I've actually just started training in this way again because I I wanted to get some strength back and and I enjoyed it when I did last time so my experience was the
00:24:45
Speaker
one arm chin working towards a one arm chin up and i tested a weighted pull up and i found that the jump in without training weighted pull ups directly i was only working on one arm chin up work and i found my weighted chin up
00:25:02
Speaker
I can't remember what the exact figure was at the time, but I think it went up from like 30 odd kilos or 30 kilos up to when I retested it after, let's say, three months, maybe six months. It went up to about, I think I PBed at 45, maybe 50 kilos.
00:25:21
Speaker
And I wasn't training any weighted chin ups already. It was only the one arm chin up work. And that was my aha moment when I saw it. I was like, actually, there is some there is some there is some method in the madness. There absolutely is. It's like, you know, it's it's not just stuff we're making up. It actually, like you said, it works. You you don't have to do the weighted chin up. You just did the one arm chin up aggression work.
00:25:44
Speaker
and then you find your weighted chin up is going up in the background for free. Well, that's great because now if you were thinking about having a weighted chin up progression day, you know, a weighted chin up day in your program or anything, you don't have to work on that exercise. You can work on the one arm chin up progressions and you can rest easily and sleep easily at night knowing that your weighted chin up is going up for free in the background. That's the whole idea. Yeah, brilliant.
00:26:09
Speaker
And in terms of, uh, in terms of, I believe this is related to strength. Where do you see hypertrophy? So muscle growth, uh, in comparison to what we're trying to achieve here, do you think it's solely reserved for just strength increases? And in that case, would we have to supplement the training with some accessory work, for example, or do you think this carryover extends to muscle growth or hypertrophy as well?
00:26:34
Speaker
Yeah, I think I definitely can transfer over to hypertrophy. I don't think anyone's going to go from doing push-ups, rows, and normal pull-ups to doing then later, plants push-ups, handstand push-ups, one-arm chin-ups, front levers, and increasing their squat and everything, and not get bigger. This is not going to happen. Our bodies are going to adapt.
00:26:58
Speaker
Now, what we tend to tell people is, OK, keep working, keep working and keep gaining. And as you're gaining, see, are you getting bigger or are there any areas that are lagging behind? Now, if they start to find, oh, hey, I want this area like, you know, maybe my neck or my abs, I want them to kind of come out a little bit more. OK, now, after we've done this base work here, we're going to toss in a little bit of isolation at the end if we needed to work on those specific areas.
00:27:27
Speaker
we do it after we've tested to see if the base stuff will work. It's kind of like, what's the point of starting off with all these extra toppings on the training when maybe just the base would have worked? And then later, if we need the extra toppings, because we had to find out that they're needed, then we can add them in.
00:27:51
Speaker
yeah okay that makes sense so it's almost like you're you're getting your foundation's work done with these uh the big six as you call them now uh and anything else you want to add on top of that so if you want um bigger arms you can do your 100 sets of curls by more than a week uh if you want a bigger chair so you can you can do whatever exercise you want to do to be able to do that as well
00:28:15
Speaker
So in your quest for finding the minimal effective dose, as you call it, or the sort of most bang for your back movement, what have your strategies been for being able to test and improve the effectiveness of each of these methods? Oh, that's fun. So for finding out which exercises have carryover, what we basically have to do, we limit what we're doing. So we just do six to six, right?
00:28:45
Speaker
And this is where sometimes it calls for a little bit of um
00:28:49
Speaker
It can be a little scary at first, right? It's like, I'm not doing this other exercise or that one. I've never not done the exercise before. So we would have, we would practice those exercises only, just the big six. And then we test the other exercises and see every now and then, are they going up? So maybe what I would do is I would start off doing a movement, like, I don't know, I'll test the deadlift. I'll see my max and the deadlift.
00:29:17
Speaker
And then I'll write that down. And then now from then on for the next six, eight, 12 weeks, whatever time period I set, no more deadlifting. No deadlifting at all. Just the big six. Then at the end of it, I retest the deadlift. Did the deadlift go up? If it did, great. We found out, ah, the big six transfers over to this movement. And if it didn't, then we find out, okay, maybe the big six doesn't transfer over to that movement.
00:29:44
Speaker
And when we did that, we found that just nearly every movement we could think of would go up. So for the sake of exercises, we found that's the way we test to see how much we need to do in terms of exercises to make games with everything.
00:30:00
Speaker
In terms of the volume, this is another scary one. What you can do, what we do, we just keep bringing the amount of work that we do down. So it's like, hey, maybe the first one we try five sets. Then next week we see, do we make gains for five sets? Great. Let's get scary now. Let's drop down to four sets.
00:30:19
Speaker
Ah, now, after 4 says, the next week, do we make games? Great. Let's try dropping into 3. And from there, we keep playing around until we find the amount of work that actually needs to get done to make games. It's kind of scary, but it's really fun. Yeah, it sounds like you've put in a lot of time, and I think it's good that we have access to this information at this point, so we don't have to, you know, because who's got this? At least now, I have an excuse for my chicken legs and that I can... I'm just testing my upper body.
Optimizing Training Efficiency
00:30:49
Speaker
Big six at the moment and I'm not working on that. Stop blaming genetics or anything like that. I love it. So the timeframes in which you're doing this as well, let's say you're testing your deadlift, as you mentioned before, and you said you're reducing these sets on a periodic basis. What sort of timeframe do you generally go for when you're testing something in particular?
00:31:17
Speaker
We try to do at least six weeks because if you do too often, some people might try to do it once a week or once every other week, but we've had people, we've seen people literally gain on movements training once every two weeks. There's still enough time to gain sometimes, especially if it's training hard and you're working near that peak point.
00:31:40
Speaker
So we try to push it to run at least 6 and sometimes longer. That way we can really get to see like did this movement increase without direct work or does it stay the same or does it drop. Otherwise too soon you're basically at that point training the movement you know.
00:31:59
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. And I've seen you've done some stuff on sort of the cardiovascular stuff as well. So not just the big six, but you've been looking at how you can apply this method to getting the most out of your cardio, improving your cardiovascular side of things with the least amount of time possible. Was that a fair assessment? Yeah, yeah. We've done the same thing with that. I used to do something called a sprint drop set, which is pretty much the most miserable thing one can ever do to themselves.
00:32:32
Speaker
You know, the first thing you want to do is to try it out. You have to determine how much you hate yourself. And if you really do hate yourself, then this is going to be perfect for you. So first determine that. Then you go find maybe like a big hill or a big strip of grass because if something's soft, it's better to do on a soft surface or a track, whatever.
00:32:50
Speaker
And you break out into a full sprint. And then as you're sprinting, you're going to start fatiguing. So your sprint will drop down to a run. The run will drop down to a jog. The jog will probably drop down to a walk, maybe a crawl. Then you'll fall on the ground. You'll die. You'll cry. And then you'll rest. And then you might do it again. One, two, maybe three sets. But most people aren't going to get past probably two of those.
00:33:16
Speaker
And then you don't do that again for like another seven days, eight days, and you do it again, you're good to go. I did that for some time and I found that my gains kept increasing for quite some time before it kind of leveled off, which is what a lot of people find with cardio anyway.
Innovative Cardio Techniques: Sprint Drop Set
00:33:33
Speaker
You know, especially for those like, you know, long spring, longer spring times, works for about, you know, two, two months, eight weeks.
00:33:42
Speaker
And there at that point, it starts to kind of level off a little bit. So we found that was really effective for getting to that point without having to spend a lot of time doing it. So in terms of what you were measuring there, was it, did you have a like a stopwatch on how long you could go for? Or was it distance? Or has you excreted from the body and how much? How long we go before, before we just like fall on the ground and die and cry? How much crying we did? Was there any sweat left to cry with, you know?
00:34:11
Speaker
Yeah, we mentioned like distance, speed, and endurance and everything. And I found that after about like eight weeks, I sort of started this level off and it wasn't improved anymore. But for that small time investment, which was barely anything at all, I was really happy with the gains I made with eight weeks of training. Yeah, that is really, really interesting, actually.
00:34:33
Speaker
I had a just going back to the the triathlete so she does Ironman so obviously very long very very long distance endurance events and we were talking about how to split sessions and things like that and something we'll come on and you know come on to in a sec.
00:34:48
Speaker
But there's this idea of when she does the hard sessions, she says she does easy sessions as well. When she says you need to make the easy sessions, they need to be easy. They need to be really relaxed.
00:35:04
Speaker
in order to be able to go really hard on the other session. So it sounds like it's got a bit of transfer to what you're doing here as well. So you're going, the hard sessions are very, very hard in that you're pushing yourself to the absolute limit and, you know, consuming many, many boxes of tissues with how much you're crying at the end of the sprint sessions. But you're also, you're testing it every seven days. So that rest period is really, really long and you're making sure you're doing, you know,
00:35:33
Speaker
What do you sort of do on those days in between? I think you've seen you do like walks on walks that as well We typically go for walks and and like you said like your other a podcast person came on Though the low intensity stuff is very low intensity. So we go for walks and we call it urban hiking who just go up hills in the neighborhood and
00:35:54
Speaker
So it's like, it's low intensity. It's not really hard work. Well, it's just for circadian rhythm. It's for recovery. It helps you get outside, helps you sleep better that night. And we do those on the off days. So we have the really, really hard workouts and the really, really soft, relaxing walks up the hills and everything. And we stay out that middle zone where it's like, you know, kind of fatiguing, but not so strong that it goes into that little heart.
00:36:23
Speaker
Yeah, okay. You mentioned circadian rhythms out there. So how does that incorporate into your sort of training, your exercise regime?
Circadian Rhythm and Health
00:36:33
Speaker
Oh man, that was huge. I have an autoimmune condition called ulcerative colitis, so I got really into health basically because I wanted to help improve my autoimmune condition. One of the things I was learning about was circadian rhythms and how those help with health
00:36:54
Speaker
recovery. And what we were basically finding out was that things like light, exercise, food timing, temperature, and socializing, those can have a big effect on one's health. So like for example, if you can get outside every morning and get some sunlight on as much of your skin as legally and morally possible,
00:37:23
Speaker
Don't go walking around naked. Yeah, definitely. Don't go outside and say, well, Phil told me to do that. No.
00:37:30
Speaker
No, you keep it, keep it up, keep it modest, but yeah, as much as you can, that will help to set your circadian rhythm. And then if you can do it again at solar noon, which is usually some place between 12 or two o'clock depending where you live, that will again help it. If you can do it around sunset, that can help. So we tell people try to get outside three times a day, sunrise, solar noon, sunset, and that light helps to stimulate your circadian rhythm, which is a fancy way of saying your body's
00:38:02
Speaker
biological internal clock, knowing what time date it is, and you'll notice you'll sleep better at night. And then we also have the opposite at night during the nighttime. We try to close the blinds. We use blackout curtains to make sure our room is pitch black, gets your hand from your face.
00:38:18
Speaker
This is a hard one. We try to turn off technology like our cell phones and the TV two hours before bed. And instead we read some books underneath a red light, especially the light you would use for a reptile. So that helps us to get back to sleep at night. And if you do these things, man, you will see that your sleep just improves so much. Your health feels better. Your energy feels better.
00:38:45
Speaker
It's wonderful. We found that along with all the other things like intermittent fasting, like the food part, exercising a little bit in the morning, getting active, getting those walks and everything. It helps so much for our health and our sleep every night. But it's been a blast to actually learn about those things and improve them because it's just it's wonderful.
00:39:07
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. I've seen, I've actually got some of these, I'll show you, obviously you can't see on the pod, on the podcast if you're listening, but I've got some of these, which are, these are, these are blue light blockings. And it's effectively, it's almost a bit like when you turn the setting on, on your, your phone, basically that night mode where it kind of goes to that warm tone of color. Yeah. I've been using those, they're pretty good actually, but the, yeah, the importance of sleep is really, that's come up quite a bit actually in some of the other episodes.
00:39:37
Speaker
know how important it is to get a good night's sleep and you know the strategies you can implement to do that so I've also seen that circadian rhythms can really influence things like jet lag as well so you can use that advantage to counter jet lag and make sure you know when you're when you're coming back I think it's from west I think it's from west to east it's worse than it is from east to west but
00:40:02
Speaker
I think, well, maybe it depends on your original destination, but your home sort of area. But yeah, that's really interesting. So just going back to the sort of training method you're implementing there.
Advice for Beginners on Big Six Progressions
00:40:14
Speaker
If I'm just looking to get started with this, what would you recommend as a good place to start and to incorporate these big six movements into our training and then obviously some of the other elements you talked about as well?
00:40:27
Speaker
I would definitely start with the beginner versions of those movements. Let's say you're a beginner, start with the beginner versions, which would be like the lean forward push-up, which is the beginning version of the plants push-up. Then there's the pike push-up for the handstand push-up. There is the chin-up or mixed grip chin-up for the one-arm chin progression. And if there's someone who can't do a chin-up, then we use the assisted chin-up.
00:40:53
Speaker
And then we have movement called a body weight arc row for the front lever rows. And then we combine that with assisted single leg squats for most people or sort of back squat, whatever they have available, depends on if they have a gym or not.
00:41:06
Speaker
and a nautical progression and that gets people off on the start towards the rest of the big six movements that come later afterwards. But if you have those basic foundational movements then you are going to be able to progress further. Brilliant. So for the legs you've got branch push-up for what's that chest and shoulders area maybe?
00:41:27
Speaker
Yeah, like a horizontal push almost. Yeah, okay. Yeah, then you got your arm chin up would be all the regressions are more for the Pulling movement and the same with the arc rows. Oh, yeah, and then your hands down push up again your pushing movement So you got pushing like in two planes maybe and then pulling in a couple of cleans as well with it. Is that a fair segment?
00:42:06
Speaker
That's an interesting launch. I'm training planes today. If it's in everything really, like yeah, if you're doing something like no bodybuilding, you're just like, I want to actually be able to like, you know, also do some cool calisthenics work. You can fit it in just so that you have, if you have a, you said, a chest, a day, a chest and shoulder day, you just put the plant spaceship back in that day and bam, you're good to go. Amazing.
00:42:12
Speaker
Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep,
00:42:27
Speaker
Okay, so Phil if people want to find out a little bit more about this big six and how you train and some of the methodologies you use Where can someone go to find out a bit more information?
Where to Find More of Philip and Martina
00:42:40
Speaker
So they could check out our Instagram. What our handle is the underscore mindful underscore mover and
00:42:48
Speaker
We also have a YouTube, which is look up Mindful Mover. You'll find all of our videos on there. I think my wife, she's the one, she's the brains behind all this. I think she recently made a TikTok, which she's sharing videos to from there. And then if you want, they can send us the email, which is mail at mindfulmover.com. You can contact us. We'll respond back right there.
00:43:12
Speaker
I will put those in the description of the podcast so everyone can have a look and find out more about this sort of style of training. Do you offer coaching as well? Absolutely, that's our whole thing we do online coaching. So we help people who really want to make that wide range of games, make all the games possible.
00:43:32
Speaker
But in the limited time, thank you so much for your time. This has actually been such a such an insightful chat. And, you know, it's I think there's a lot of takeaways from this, especially if you're low on time, you don't have much, you know, much access to a gym or something like that. Or even, you know, you don't really sounds like you don't really need access to a gym for this. You just need access to a would you say like a pull up bar and that's about it, really, or a partner that's heavy enough to to give you some resistance.
00:44:00
Speaker
Absolutely. Yeah, if you have a pull-up bar, you're doing great. If you have a pull-up bar and some rings, now you're fancy. A pull-up bar, some rings, and maybe like a little bit of weight for the squats. And at that point, you can just go ahead and you don't even go to the gym. You're good to go. Not only are we saving time, we're saving money as well. Look at that. Yes, absolutely. Phil, thank you so much. Really, really appreciate it. Thank you.
00:44:43
Speaker
you