S2E09 · The Big Rocks

people always look for the, they look at the edges, they look at like the next fad diet, the next like exercise program, but neglect the foundational stuff that they should be doing. - Too often, like we in our profession, we get asked the question of, well, like what exercise should I do? What's this new exercise? Or what supplements should I be taking? Or where's like, if we would draw a pyramid, like the foundation, this is the stuff we're talking about, is good sleep, good nutrition. And I almost, you know, been in the industry a long time now, I almost like shirk at those conversations because it's just like, well, like we're missing the forest for the trees.

- And in this moment, I swear, we are infinite. - Let's do this, come on! - Mounting. (upbeat music) - It's too damn hot for a penguin to be just walking around. - Three, two, one, eagle! - Are these two doctors? - I'm afraid so. - And here we go. - This is Simon Cooper. - Lachlan Wallace. - Welcome back. - Episode, oh, episode number four of the Virtus podcast. - Season two. - Season two. - The big rocks. - Yeah. - Tell me about the big rocks. - This is gonna be a good one. I think a lot of people is gonna get some, get some value out of this conversation.

The big rocks, I think this is gonna be a pretty tactical conversation. There's gonna be some tangible things that people can walk away and start to implement straight away. But essentially, the big rocks are the big things in our life that contribute toward our health and wellbeing. It's like the low hanging fruit that we can pick up and run with and make the biggest change to how we feel. - The foundation, it's the shit that we know we should do. But sometimes we're too, too much. We follow our lizard brain too much. And we lean into our, what's the word I'm looking for?

Our primal urges more than we should. And we make poor decisions on the things that we know we should do. - Yeah, yeah. - I don't think any of this is a technical problem. People aren't missing the information. We know we should sleep. We know we should eat good food. We know we should hydrate. We know we should move. So then the conversation is around, okay, why don't we do these things? - Yeah, none of this is groundbreaking stuff either. It's all pretty, it's all simple things that we need to do to survive and to feel good.

- Yeah, I think that survive, let's change the word survive to thrive because we can get by on inadequate (mumbles) We can get by on poor nutrition. We can get by on low hydration. We can get by on four hours sleep. We can get by by sitting down and doing fuck all day. But if we wanna thrive and live a life where we're able to have the capacity and grow the capacity to do all the cool shit we wanna do, then these are more imperative than anything else we do. - Yes. - Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

- And we're done. - And we're done. - Let's frame this conversation a little bit more around maybe the time that we're in now where I think people are neglecting these things these big things because of the state of like fear and anxiety that we're in during the pandemic. And then I think the other thing is that-- - Good sleep, good nutrition. And I almost get been in the industry a long time now, I almost like shirk at those conversations because it's just like, well, like we're missing the forest for the trees. There's here are the things that will help you improve more than everything else.

If you're ticking those boxes, ticking them consistently and doing it well, then we can have the conversation around what superfluous supplements do we add to make you that 1% better. But if we're missing the 80% at the other end, then we're almost wasting our time having those conversations. Because if you're having four hours sleep and wanna take some melatonin to improve that four hours, you probably should just find a way to extend that sleep out. So you're actually getting to get more quality sleep and having those three things. So I think it's making sure that

you're, making sure that the basics are ticked off and saying things like do the basics well and the fundamentals like this cliche is like the basics are the basics 'cause they work. It's cliche it is. Here's another cliche. Cliches are cliches because they are things. It's mostly true. So if we can get our head around-- - Cliche is three times faster. - Cliche, cliche, cliche, cliche. We can get our head around doing the basic shit well, then whether it's, whether our goals are centered around athletic development, whether they're around taking over the world from a business perspective or just looking after your health and wellbeing and your family.

Like if we can do these things well, we have more capacity to do those things. If we don't do these things well and we wanna look after our family, we're gonna be short with them because we're tired and lacking in sleep. We're not gonna have the energy levels to be able to run after our kids. We're not gonna have the capacity because we're dehydrated to actually talk around the things that we wanna talk about. - Yeah. - So we, yeah, we give up so much if we don't do these things well. - Yeah. And the thing about these big four rocks or the fundamentals or the basics is that they're not sexy.

We can't like sleep and dress them up. - Sleep is the sexiest thing in the world sometimes. - Look, I agree with you, I'm on the same page, but yeah, they're basic things that we know we should be doing, but we're always looking for the sexy thing or the shortcut or the one percenters. - Yeah, looking for the dopamine and serotonin dumps that come from like the short-term gratification, which impacts these more than we probably realize. You know, whether it's scrolling on our phone or having a beer instead of some water or having the bloody connoisseur for the week rather than having a banana or an apple or something like that.

Like there's the gap. It's the, you know, what we want now versus what we want later. It's almost, they're competing commitments. - Yes, yep. Well, let's get stuck straight into what the four rocks are and the format for this is let's just dive into each rock, explore it a little bit, give you some strategies, and then we'll kind of wrap it up at the end. - Yeah, and each one of these, like just to preface this conversation, we know that it's like an infinite deep dive that we can take on each one of these. Like there's an immense amount of nuance and almost dogma that we could dive into and try and peel apart the differences and things like that.

But I guess the aim for this conversation is for everyone just to leave knowing, okay, well, here's a couple of things I can do to improve my sleep. Here's a couple of things I can do to improve nutrition and movement, et cetera, et cetera. Here's a few targets that I can try and hit so that I know that I'm gonna be more capable down the track. And that's pretty much it. - Yeah. - That's all right. - We've done a little bit of research. We've done a little bit of research. - All right, Karen. - Our own experiences and- - This conversation's backed up by, we've both been in this industry for 10 years.

We see what works, we see what doesn't. We follow the research, but we also have a level of, a big bank of anecdotal evidence that we see works. So I guess the conversation around these four things, we're gonna talk what's optimal. And what's optimal is going to be different for every human being, okay? There's no argument there. If Simon and I are pretty similar, similar body shape, similar, like I'm obviously more jacked and better looking and things like that. But we're very similar. - Debatable. My mom would think differently. - Please. We're very similar. But

if we ate exactly the same thing, trained exactly the same way, slept the same and was on hydration, drank the same amount of water, then we would still have different outcomes and we would have slightly different outputs. So it's important to understand that you are all unique little snowflakes, but the basics that make up the optimal, trying to get to the optimal level are pretty similar. And then there's nuance and shifts from there. So let's get stuck into it. Let's get into movement. - We can start with movement? - Yeah, let's start there. I think it's, like this is one of the cornerstones of what we do at Virtus.

We help people move well and move often. And stealing that a little bit from FMS, but that is essentially what we want to communicate. That daily movement, regardless of, let's take apart the intentional exercise part for the moment, because of course that's important. But we're talking about moving the whole system, our body, regularly throughout the day. - Yeah, I think we can look at it almost two sides of the conversation. There's the health side of the conversation of movement, and then there's the performance or training side of the conversation. And you can't lean into the training side, the performance side, unless you've ticked the box of the health side.

Okay, so the health side is being free of pain, being able to move well, to not have any, we use the term handbrakes at Virtus, is to not have any handbrakes, is for us to be able to perform the things we need to perform and adapt the way we need to adapt without any negative consequences. So the term functional has been bastardized by both football salesmen and people who do shake weights and stuff like that. But the important part of functional is it's your ability to adapt to an internal or external stimulus, and it's your

ability to pick up the kids, or it's your ability to go for a run and do these things without pain, and do these things without making you worse. And that's the most important part of movement, is we wanna make ourselves better, we wanna grow our capacity to be healthy, and then we can add the capacity from a training perspective, which is teaching all your body systems to do more and be better. And then obviously you get to the point if we're talking a continuum or a body triangle, it doesn't matter, but if we get towards the end of the performance continuum, that's gonna impact on your health.

So if you're training for, say, an Ironman, or you're training to be a top level, whatever it is, then you're gonna give up some health at that end. But the basis of what allows you to do that is that big, strong base of health and wellbeing to start off with. So I guess what are the, we talked about daily movement versus training, what are the things that we can do from a daily movement's perspective to allow us to be healthier and happier? Yeah, full stop, question mark. I think at the moment it's more difficult because we're stuck at home and we're limited by how much time we can spend outside and where we can go.

But I think a simple way to move often is to get up from your desk, get up from your workspace, and walk around the house or go for a walk outside. I think we're in a society or a culture where we're sitting down for eight hours plus a day. We're sitting down more than we sleep. And we need to almost take all the opportunity, every opportunity that we can in order to get up, move, and express ourself in a physical domain. Yes. Yeah, I think the simple targets for that is whatever arbitrary number you choose to do.

Every hour you move for 10 minutes or every day you try and hit 10,000 steps and you spread it out however you want. A big aspect of what we do at Virtus is teaching people to understand what they need and how their body's feeling. So breathing correctives and Brettzel is how we kinda unlock that at Virtus. And if you don't know what a Brettzel is, just Google it. Jump on the Virtus YouTube channel. I'm pretty sure we've got a couple of videos explaining it. But the Brettzel is like a diagnostic tool to go, okay, how am I feeling, what do I need?

And those clients, members that we have that are working from home at the moment, my suggestion is, all right, jump into Brettzel every 20 minutes, every 30 minutes, and just go, okay, what am I feeling? And then give yourself that. It might be just some mobility. It might be just a movement flow. It might be a mobility session. It might be just some crocodile breathing. Whatever it is, allow yourself to ensure that you're not losing capacity by sitting all the time. And the issue is that we take it too far the other way and we go, okay, well, I'll be sitting for eight hours.

I better go smash myself training for an hour to make up for it. Whereas, like anything, we're gonna be better off little bits at a time. If you're gonna eat an elephant, you're not gonna try and eat it all at once. - And by the time. - And by the time. - We fall into that trap of letting ourself off the hook because we say, we tell ourselves that we train at a high intensity for 60 to 90 minutes every day or every second day. But if we look at the whole day or the whole

week, which is 168 hours, instead of doing three or four quick maths, three or four training sessions a week, then there's 164 other hours in the week where you're either sleeping or more likely than not, you're sitting down, working, eating, like socializing. So we need to take, as I said before, we need to take every opportunity we can in order to move, to explore different ranges of motion, to explore different movement patterns and positions. And this contributes to our global health. - Great use of the term global health, this is very good. - Thank you. - I think that daily walking is like the most under, under, understated.

- Underutilized. - Underutilized tool, like just get out and get moving. Like if you do 10,000 steps a day every day, then you are going to be incredibly more healthy than you would be if you do, like full stop. - We've had so many people in our community who have not necessarily been training as often, but they've been walking every single day. And the health benefits of that is staggering. Really. - Yeah, it's too simple. Like it's not sexy. Like we're told we need high intensity interval training. We're told we need to smash us up.

We don't, we just need, you know, from a daily movement, like if you hit 10,000 steps and do some mobility work, you don't need to do a session. If we want to improve capacity, then we add sessions, but it's, we add something that allows you to be consistent over a long period of time. That's what works. It takes time, good shit takes time. And I think it's important to understand that from a movement perspective. And then once we've got that health under wraps, and again, I say once we've got the health under wraps, your health doesn't have to be perfect for us to work on performance training.

They will work together, same as, you know, the other big rocks we talk about. - Yeah, but the beautiful thing about walking as well is that we can walk with other people. We can socialize, we can hit that kind of connection pillar. We can listen to a podcast or an audio book and hit the learning pillar. Or we can go walking without any other stimulus and practice some mindfulness. So. - Have some space. - Two birds, one stone. - You know the trick to killing two birds, one stone? - I don't. - Oh, big rock, little birds.

- That's one. (laughs) - Carry on. - Relevant joke, awful joke. Awful, but relevant. That's movement. - Yeah, well, I think the other side we didn't speak about was the training side and the capacity building performance side of movement, which, you know, we could, we'll get into another on our podcast, but the way we look at movement or the way we look at training is it's same, same pyramids or similar pyramids we're talking about before. Movement comes first. We wanna move well and move often, like you said. We wanna be free of pain. If we're free of pain, then we build capacity.

And if we can build capacity, then we build conditioning and aerobic capacity on top of that. So capacity is just strength, speed, power, all those kinds of things. If, again, we can work on, if we have an injury in a certain area, we can still work on capacity. But what we need to understand is that if we're missing a gap with capacity, then the foundation of that pyramid isn't gonna be as strong. So if for those out there training, make sure what you're doing is actually making you better. That's it. Movement down. Yeah. - Yeah. It's just layers, right?

- Just layers. - Health comes first, then function, then performance. - Yeah, they come, they are layered, but they're also intertwined. So know that if you focus on health and then you can focus on performance and know that it'll improve your health if you do it the right way. - Yep. Love it. - Thanks. - Let's chat nutrition. - Nutrition? Good, all right. Well. - Super simple. Let's go super first. - And this is the thing about nutrition. It's such a deep dive and there is so much dogma around nutrition that I just don't wanna borrow it.

But here's the thing. All that matters with nutrition is good quality food. Until you have a specific goal that you want to achieve. So for example, most of the goals around nutrition are either lose weight, increase weight, so increase body, like improve your body composition to increase muscle mass, or it's improved performance, right? All three of those, you need high quality nutrition. You need good food, which is important for all your body functions, right? From a health perspective. But if the goal is to lose weight or put on weight, and that's the only goal and there isn't the health goals that come with it, then all that matters is your energy balance, full stop.

Like if you wanna lose weight, put yourself in a calorie deficit, full stop. If you wanna put on weight, put yourself in a calorie surplus, full stop. Do that for a long period of time and you'll get where you wanna get to, yeah? Learn how to track your food, learn how to track your calories, learn how to measure what you're actually putting in your body because most of us grossly other, grossly underestimate the amount of calories we actually eat and the amount of energy we actually eat. And that's like, that's all nutrition has to be.

And then you start building things around health, which is like, don't subscribe to a diet that cuts out any big chunk of food, unless you have a specific intolerance to that food. And I think the most important thing with diet and sorry to steal all this, but the most important thing about diet is you still wanna eat the food you love. Like we get one life, if you wanna eat a fucking toasted cheese sandwich with like 17 different types of cheeses, load up on that because it's probably delicious. But know that. - That's my lunch today.

- Know that if you wanna achieve certain things, there's gonna have to be a little bit of sacrifice. You can still eat the foods you want, but you've just gotta track your calories and make sure that you're not, yeah, if you wanna lose weight in that calorie surplus. It's, good nutrition is just about like fighting or fighting is maybe the wrong word, is the competing commitments between what you wanna eat and what you should be eating. Like everyone knows good food and bad food, mostly. - Yeah, for sure. - Be a fucking adult about it and put the right thing in your book.

That's it, full stop. - It's simple when we look at it like that, right? - Yes. - What's healthier, a piece of fruit or a chocolate bar? - Yeah. - And we know the answer. We can try and justify the other way, but we're missing, again, we're missing the forest for the trees. And I think one of the biggest things about nutrition is, it's just being consistent over time. Like we need to, if we wanna see a change in our goals, let's say we've nailed the basic nutrition, quality food thing. Then if we wanna see

progress on whatever goal we have, whether it's body composition, whether it's performance, then it's just a matter of being consistent over time with what we're putting in our bodies. - Yeah, being consistent, but also being precise. So if you've got in your head, okay, well, I need to be in a 10% calorie deficit and you're not measuring your food, but you're like, oh yeah, I'm in a calorie deficit, but I haven't, I put on five kilos. Well, you're not in a calorie deficit. So this is the, you can't, like with nutrition, what's the James Clear quote around your habits?

So your outcomes are a lagging effect of your habits, right? If your habits aren't precise and you're not actually in that calorie deficit, then you are not gonna lose weight. No matter how much you tell yourself, like the story you tell yourself is built around, well, I'm actually in a calorie deficit, if you're not. And it's so easy for people to argue about that, but it's just, it's the case. And I don't give a flying fuck whether you're on a carnivore diet or you're eating vegan or you're intermittent fasting, whatever. It's so simple. You don't have to eat your body type.

You don't have to eat your blood type. You don't have to eat certain foods when the full moon's coming out. Like just put food in your body that you know will make you improve your capacity to do things. If you wanna drink a beer on a Friday night, drink a beer on a Friday night. If you wanna have five beers, drink five beers, but just know that there's cause and effect to everything we put in our body. We can know there's cause and effect to everything we do, but just to talk about the food conversation, there's cause and effect.

If you decide to have, and it's all decision-based. If you decide to have an energy drink and a coffee for breakfast, that's gonna impact your energy input. It's gonna impact the lack of nutrients you're getting. And it's gonna impact how you feel throughout the day. It's gonna impact whether you achieve your goals that you wanna achieve or not. So, you know, food makes me mad because everyone argues over just nuances and like, I don't care what you put in your mouth. I don't care what you put in your body. I just know that there's a consequence to whatever you choose to put in your mouth.

- Yes. - Yeah, maybe that flippin' attitude needs to change, but. - There's definitely a discipline component to this. We need to be disciplined with what we put in our bodies and we need to be disciplined with the decisions that we make. And like with any goal, it has to be measurable, coming back to that precision thing. - Yes. - We need to be able to measure what we're doing. We need to be, it needs to be realistic. So we can't expect to, if our diet is rubbish right now, then completely shifting gear and going

into a, like cutting everything out of your diet that you are currently relying upon may not work because you need to be consistent with that. So. - Everyone knows, you're dieting what it is and why it doesn't work. - Yes. - It's all around. - So it's just, it's making small changes every day. - Exactly, exactly. Making the right decision more often than not. - Yeah. - 'Cause yeah, last thing you wanna do, if you love beers, you know, if you wanna get around the boys at Blue Room, Blue Room Brewing, our first sponsor, then get around, like enjoy that beer.

Don't like beat yourself up. Oh no, I just had three beers, I'm such a piece of shit. I just had three beers, how good was that? Now, you know, let's, let's make sure I'm hydrated and let's make sure that I have a good breakfast. Let's make sure, you know, and in terms of a training perspective, the way I look at, the way I look at food is every, we talk about pre-workout, post-workout, that kind of stuff, every meal you have is a preparation for what you wanna do next. So if I have something shitty for breakfast this morning, there's a good chance I'm not gonna feel great throughout the day.

That's gonna impact how I'm feeling. Make sure I can supplement with bulk caffeine, but eventually I'm gonna hit the wall. So just eat good food. - We need to eat, we need to eat the way we wanna perform. We wanna perform at a high level, then we need to eat high quality food and eat at a high level. Take our nutrition really seriously. It's the same with each of these four rocks. If we're looking, like really looking after our sleep and really looking after our movement, but our nutrition is through the floor, then that's the low-hanging fruit that we can start to improve on.

- Yeah, and it's the supplement conversation, right? Like if we need to make sure that we're putting good food in our body before we worry about like whether creatine is going to help us get that little bit extra- - Wait a minute, so are you saying that supplements are merely a supplement to our diet? - No, I'm saying that, yes, that's what I'm saying. (laughing) - They're called supplements for a reason. - Yeah, that's true. - The last thing I wanna say on nutrition is actually two things. One, be kind to yourself, you mentioned that, and improve your relationship with food.

Food is there to nourish us. We can look at it as a tool, but it's also there to provide nourishment and provide happiness. And we share meals with our loved ones. That's another thing that we can kind of connect food to. So that's sort of one thing. But the other thing is, and this is maybe a little bit more tactical, is the 80/20 rule. If we look at, if we look after 80% of our diet, but give ourselves a little bit more flexibility over the 20%, then that's a win. That's coming back to like the 20% is having an ice cream after dinner or having a beer on a Friday night.

Or coming out with friends and having a burger. - Yeah, days don't really exist anymore, so it'd be a last night, it was delicious, so. - Play on. - That's the thing, it's the self-discipline. It's like the self-discipline, self-respecting thing of like put good shit in your body. But then also the self-care of like, if you feel as though this beer will help make you feel better and give you more capacity, more space to do good things tomorrow, then fucking drink the fucking beer. Or gin. - Feel good, play good. - Oh, feel good, eat good, play good.

- I had drops of gin last night. - Did ya? - Second shout out. - Just plugging in on my businesses, I love it. - Let's talk about hydration, which is pretty much hand-in-hand with nutrition. - All right, here's hydration. And these are the notes I've written for hydration. Don't be shit, be an adult, drink your fucking water. That's it. Drink two to three layers of water a day depending on body weight, and then carry on. Carry on with your life, that's it. Put less processed shitty drinks in your body, like your Cokes and your juices and your watch knots.

And the simple analogy or the simple way I like to look at hydration is, what percentage of us are water? Like, depending on what textbook you read, it's like 70 to 80 something, whatever. 70 to 80% of us are water. Think of all the body processes, all the bodily processes that happen, cellular processes, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Think of how many of those rely on adequate or optimal hydration for them to be able to work optimally. All right, as soon as we drop below that optimal level of hydration, the shit that our body does starts to work less efficiently, whatever, whatever way you want to put it.

The processes don't work the way they should. Okay, so our body's gotta make concessions and it's gotta pick and choose potentially what it uses the water source for. So just drink your fucking water, that's it, be an adult. - If you're hungry, eat food. If you're thirsty, drink water. - Drink water before you're thirsty. - Yeah. - And for those listening at home, I'm drinking water right now because I'm a self-respecting adult. - Well done. (laughing) - Well, it was fun, like last week for the COVID Games, our challenge for the week was drink three liters of water a day.

And three liters is a great aim to start at. Like most people will need maybe two to three, somewhere in the middle there. But it was a big eye-opener for a lot of people. Like, fuck, I'm not drinking enough water. It was like, I'm peeing all day. I'm like, yeah, you'll get used to that. Like your body will get used to having that extra water there to utilize. Maybe don't try and don't drink a liter at once. Give your body like little sips throughout the day. But it showed, the reason why we're talking about big rocks is because a lot of people don't move enough.

A lot of people don't eat quality food. A lot of people don't hydrate enough. A lot of people don't sleep enough. And these are the things that will allow us to do all the cool shit we want to do. People come to us and go, oh, I'm not losing weight. I'm like, well, then let's focus on the simple shit. Let's not worry about the, oh, I want to do more high intensity interval training in our sessions. Or I want more core training. I'm like, well, no, you don't. You just, are you sleeping enough? Are you having your three liters or two and a half liters or whatever it is?

If the answer's no, then like, you know, it's almost come back and let's talk about it when you tick in that box. - Yep. So what are some, what are some like tactical things that people can do to drink more water? - Well, everyone's gonna be different, but I think having a, that's a very flippant answer, but having a, just having a drink bottle with you all day. I use these glass bottles because it feels nice to drink out of a glass bottle. - Are these bad boys? - Oh yes. - I think this is a leader.

- Yeah, so buy an ice drink bottle or, you know, I've already used gin bottles because I like the cork and stuff like that, but I just have three of these in the fridge. So I know that there's always gonna be chilled water or, you know, if it's freezing cold, then I just tap it. But I always have this with me, whether it's on my desk if I'm working, you know, we have it on the brekkie counter when we're at Virtus, they're like, always have water around you and just try and have a target here. - That's it.

- And we break it up. So if I wanna have three of these a day, by lunchtime I wanna have had a liter and a half, which is two of these bottles. - Yes, yeah, that's what I was gonna say. Break it up into manageable chunks. Like, and another thing that you can do is set alarms on your phone every hour, every half an hour to have a sip of water. Or if that's gonna be super annoying, just have an alarm at 10, alarm at one and alarm at four to say, this is when you should have at least drunk a water bottle or something.

- Train yourself to link it with other activities. So it doesn't matter whether it's water drinking or not, but you know, when you do this, you also do this. So it might be, you might go, okay, well, every time I check Instagram today, I'm gonna grab a drink of water. - Yeah. - There you go, just fix the world's hydration problems. - Only I. - Anything more on nutrition hydration? - No, just make the right decision, be an adult. And I say that knowing that I don't always make the right decision, right? There's a little bit of tongue in cheek there because I will eat your food on occasion.

I will, you know, drink a beer more than I should, but the majority of time, if you do the right thing, you'll get to where you wanna get to. All right, and I can't overemphasize how much, how important tracking your food is, you're gonna lose weight. Learn that skill because it will stick with you for the rest of your life and change the way you think about nutrition. - Yep. The other thing is probably worth saying is, if you are serious about tracking your diet, or if you do have intolerances that mean you need a tailored diet, then go visit a dietician or a nutritionist.

They're, they've studied three or four years at university to do this. So it's worth going and visiting them and getting an opinion that is qualified. - Yes, don't follow Instagram diets. I want my car fixed, I'm gonna go to Pete Keck, the mechanic, and I'm not gonna go to Instagram diet. Cheers, guy. Yep, awesome. Sleep, talk to me. - What do you wanna know? Sleep is the most productive thing we do. This is something that as a, what's the best way to put this? As a driven young professional, not so much now because I'm really

working on it as a focus, but early on in my career, starting a business, being a semi-mediocre athlete, all these kind of things, I definitely gave up sleep because I thought I was hustling or thought I was working hard, or I burnt the candle at both ends for a long time. And sleep is the most productive thing we do. If we want to be productive, we should sleep more. That's pretty much it, which is, like it seems counterproductive. Oh, what, I should spend less time doing the things, but it's the, this whole Big Rocks conversation has been about capacity.

It's been building capacity to do more things, to be more present and to be more aware and all those kind of things. If you sleep well, if you sleep regularly, like regularly as in the same time consistently, then your capacity to do things will increase tremendously. And I'm, the argument around, I work better at night. Oh, I'm a morning person or I'm not a morning person, whatever. No one's a morning person till you start getting up early in the morning, early in the morning. Like every-- - It's a learnable skill, right? - Yes. Everyone wants to sleep in.

Everyone wants to have the extra beer or the ice cream at night. Everyone wants to drink Coke instead of water. We train ourselves out of those habits, but it feels better to do those things. It feels better to hit snooze like I did this morning and I was late to our walk, so I apologise. - That's okay. - This is the thing. Like if we can create a, of these four big rocks, this is the biggest rock. If we can create sleep, a great sleep, sleep hygiene and sleep cycle and sleep system, and everything else gets better and easier.

- Yep, yep. And we talk about the sleep quantity, which is how long we're actually asleep for, and then there's sleep quality, which is maybe going, looking at how well we actually sleep. And if-- - The easiest way to understand that is how do you feel when you wake up? - Yeah, yeah, exactly. - Yeah, you might wake up feeling lethargic if you've had a great sleep, but very rarely. Like if you've had a great sleep, usually you wake up feeling pretty darn good. - Yeah, I think if you, like we were talking about this in a moment, but if you wake up in the middle of a sleep cycle, then you might feel a bit groggy.

But once you get up, get moving, and you assess how well you slept, then that's maybe a little bit more of an accurate rating. - Definitely, and there's so many apps and tools now that we can use to track our sleep and to track the quality of our sleep. This is measured by our movement and things like that. So there's no shortage, there's tools for all of these, all these being rocks, there's no shortage of sleep tools. And that's the thing. You know, there's a lot of research out there on sleep, and someone that's really leading this field is Matthew Walker.

I always forget which university he works at, but he's created, he wrote a book called "Why We Sleep," which is immense. - Yep. - And it talks about, you know, sleep cycles, and it talks about the different stages of sleep and what their role is, and why certain second-order consequences come from us not sleeping well, or not getting to bed early or whatever. So you actually learn, you know, learn a lot about the consequences of not having sleep rather than just, oh, sleep's good, you know, you have more sleep, which is true. But the biggest

thing I learned from him was we talk about sleep hygiene a lot, and you know, no screens an hour before bed and all that kind of stuff. But really how you spend your day determines how you sleep, and what the things you do throughout the day determine how well you sleep. Like, we look at that hour or half an hour before we actually go to bed. We really need to look at the whole day. And you know, we talk about systems last week and surround creating a system that allows you to get the best sleep possible.

Like, I don't-- - Yep. - But like, he doesn't buy into the fact that people, some people can survive off four hours of sleep. Most, if you want to thrive, you need to have seven to nine hours of sleep. Yes, some people can. - Yeah. - Can, sorry, we could all, we could all survive off that, but we're not gonna be our best selves. - That's it, and it'll catch up. It'll catch up with you later on. - Yes. - Lack of sleep has been linked to things like cancer and diabetes and heart disease, and-- - It is a carcinogen.

- Yeah, and in Matthew Walker's book, he talks about, he talks about the fact that not, there's no one process, or every process in the body, on a cellular level even, can be improved with sleep, or is negatively impacted by lack of sleep. So-- - Yes. - And that's backed by science and evidence. So it's not-- - We are slowly dying, right? - One day at a time. - If we are, if we sleep less, we are slowly dying faster. (laughing) - Yeah, we're accelerating that process. And so if we're looking for longevity, and we're looking for, to live our life the best way that we can, then sleep is a big rock that we can improve.

- We impact our ability to be less shit, and to make right decisions. And then the movement conversation, and the hydration conversation, and the nutrition conversation are impacted, because if we're sleeping properly, then we have a higher capacity to make those good quality decisions. We've all been, you know, up late at night, whether it be, you know, sitting at home watching a movie, or out drinking beers, or we make shitty decisions because we're tired and we're unable to process these things properly. - Yep. - Should we talk about sleep cycles, and the different types of sleep?

'Cause I think-- - Yeah, let's touch on that. Let's touch on that briefly. - Yeah, so for those that don't know, there are three main, there's three types of sleep, right? There's deep sleep, there's light sleep, and there's REM sleep, which is rapid eye movement. Each one has like a specific role. Deep sleep is around information storing. It takes, it's almost like you take all the information from the day and it stores it, and it reinforces it. And then light sleep. So deep sleep happens usually as soon as you go to sleep. Okay, so it's imperative that you get to bed early.

Most of us would have heard the saying like, sleep's worth double before 12 o'clock. There is research to back that up. So the, I work better at night. You know, I'm gonna stay up 'til two a.m. doing my work. You are negatively impacting your sleep. Whether you feel as though it's the case or not, Matthew Walker's research has shown that even the people that think they work better at night, they don't, they have a lower ability to make the right decision and things like that. So buy the book, listen to him, he's got a couple of Google Talks.

So I've been on Rogan and Ferris and stuff, but that-- - I think that's how I first heard of him, Rogan. - Yeah, that was one of the biggest takeaways from that. It's just like, even if you think you'll find, you're not, you're decreased. So yeah, deep sleep information storing, light sleep's information learning. So it's drawing lines between all of the information that you learn. And then REM sleep, which is where you dream, that's your creative sleep. That's where you're making sense of all those information and you're combining it all and it allows you to have creative and emotional insights.

So we go through those cycles, those three things during our sleep cycles, which 90 minutes, two hours, depending on-- - Typically, yeah. - What you read. And it can greatly impact our, how we feel when we wake up, if we wake up in the middle of one of those sleep cycles. So this is why creating a consistent sleep block might be 10 to five or 11 to six or whatever it is. If you wanna hit seven hours is incredibly important because then your brain will begin to optimize that block. - Yeah, yeah. And there's heaps of tactics and tips and tricks and things that we could tell you in order to get a better night's sleep.

Like there's, I don't know, take a hot bath before bed. I'm sure that'll help you fall asleep. But if we are stripping it back to the very basics, to the most simple things that we can start to implement in our day-to-day, it would be to have a consistent sleep routine and have almost like a hygiene routine before you, in the hours leading up to bed. - Yeah. Yeah, I think number one is just know when you go to sleep, know when you wake up. Don't keep your body guessing, just tell it what the fuck it needs to do and do it.

And then just like create, spoken about boundaries a couple of times on podcasts lately. Like it's creating boundaries around when you wanna sleep. Like protect your sleep with your life because it is life and death for your ability to do the things you wanna do. - Yeah. - Like if we stay up later than we should, our ability to store the information we learnt throughout the day is decreased. If we get up earlier than we should and say, miss the light sleep, which tends to happen later on. During the night, we lose our ability to retain that learned information.

So there's cause and effect to all this stuff and there's many second and third and fourth order consequences to having a shitty night's sleep. - Yep, yeah. So definitely having a strict, maybe not a strict, but a fairly regimented sleep routine or sleep schedule is super important. And further to that, I think if you are waking up at seven o'clock every morning during the work week and then on weekends, you blow out your sleep and wake up at midday, then that's gonna affect you going back into that routine the next week. - As I've said, it makes you feel worse as well, right?

As much as we want that instant gratification of like, oh, how is it gonna be to go back to sleep? You know you're gonna feel worse. Get up, go get a coffee and then maybe sneak an hour and a half later than that. - Yeah, I mean, naps are another conversation, I think, but there is definitely value to them if we use them well, definitely. And create a sleep, almost like a sleep ritual. So you do this and then you do this and then you do this and then you go to sleep. And just a quick Google search of like, what foods help me sleep?

What temperatures does my room have to be at? I think it's like 21 degrees or something. - Yeah, how much light do you need if you've done the outcome to your room? - The darker your room, the better your sleep. Like no screens will impact your melatonin production. You know, the blue light. You get blue light blockers like these sexy bad boys. Oh yeah, with the blue light reflecting. All these kind of things impact your ability to, for your body to produce the necessary hormones for it to get ready to sleep. Yes, you can supplement it, but again, supplements are there for, to feel the deficiency, not to replace the importance of doing these things.

- Here's a fun fact for you. - And ultimately- - No, you go. - Yeah, you go. - No, you go. I'll take my fun fact up. It's slightly interesting. It's just a little fun. It's a little fun fact. It's not a big fun fact. - We need to down-regulate our nervous system as well when we go to bed. - Ooh, getting to a sympathetic state. - Yes, the rest digest, recover state. That's crucial to us getting a good night's sleep and being able to fall asleep easily. If we go to bed and we're wired from watching cops on TV or- - Sweaty.

- Or like we've just come home from a night out, then we need to give ourselves time to down-regulate, to tap into the parasympathetic system and get ourselves ready for sleep. And one of the ways we can do that is through breath work or meditation or mindfulness. Even something as simple as reading a book, even. - Reading a book, gratitude journaling, whatever it is. Breathing's the simplest way, like some big deep breaths. - Just a possible breathing. - And through those, big exhale will make a big difference. On the night out thing, when you eat can also impact how well you sleep.

This isn't a conversation about your body storing fat or anything like that, but it just impacts your body's ability to switch everything off. Alcohol is one of the worst things that you can do for sleep. So on the conversation of the beers before, if you need it for your, made it for your mentales is probably the wrong word. If you need it just to switch off or whatever, understand that, but know that it'll impact your sleep on the other end. So with these big rocks, okay, well first order of consequence to having the beer is I have a beer.

Second order of consequence is that I feel better because it allows me to relax, great. Third order of consequence is that it'll affect my sleep. So all of these things have a trickle down effect to how they affect the other things. - Yep. - If you slam, you go, "Oh, I've only had a liter of water today," and slam a liter and a half before you go to sleep, probably gonna have to get up to piss. So know that all of these things have consequences and you just need to almost like cost benefit analysis, go,

"Is this beer going to help me more in how I feel, or is it gonna impact me more by how I sleep to impact how I feel tomorrow?" And as we know, happiness, hangovers just steal happiness from tomorrow. So carry on. - Yeah. Two last things from me on this is caffeine. If you are an afternoon coffee drinker, then, and you think that it doesn't affect your sleep, then understand that it probably does. If you- - Even if you can get to sleep, it'll impact your ability to have high quality sleep. - Yes, it's more the quality thing.

I mean, for some people, they just can't get to sleep. Like the quantity will decrease, but the quality will definitely decrease. - Yeah, and caffeine has a half life of like three to five hours, I think. So if you have a 3 p.m. coffee, potentially it's still, like there's gonna be remnants of it in your system 10 hours later. - Yep. The other thing is going outside during the day and getting sunlight. - Ooh, yeah. - Vitamin D, we know that it's good for us. Just being outside, I think is good for us on like a primal level even.

But having exposure to the sun helps regulate our hormones and enables us to regulate our sleep patterns. So go outside when it's sunny. When it gets dark, go inside. Start slipping into that nightly routine. - Definitely. Yeah, and I think just as closing thoughts on this, these four things we can argue about which one's more important, but if you do all of them pretty well, then you're well on your way to be able to add capacity down the track. And just know that you don't have to be perfect with it. You don't have to beat

yourself up if you have a shitty sleep or whatever, but use these as the foundation to creating the life you wanna live because I can tell you firsthand, you are a much better person if you've had a good sleep, eat good food, move lots, and hydrate because I'm a piece of shit if I don't do those things. - Yeah, it's a kindness to yourself and it's a kindness to other people. - Don't be shit. And do good things, keep doing good things. - Yes, I think that's a cool way to finish. - Oh yeah. And

if you need any help on this stuff or wanna lean into it or have a conversation around it, please reach out to us because that's what we're here for. This is what we do. This leads in really well to next week's conversation which is energy generation. Basically, it's how do I generate energy to do all the cool shit I wanna do without feeling like I'm relying on borrowed time or relying on caffeine or relying on these things. How can I create space for me to do cool shit? This will be a part of it. Purpose and passion will be a part of it.

Intention will be a part of it. So yeah, I'm really looking forward to that conversation. Likewise. It's been fun. - See you soon. - Bit of a longer episode, but yeah, I hope there's heaps of value in there for you. See you on the next one. (upbeat music) There is one more thing. It's been emotional. (upbeat music)