Ep. #481: Alex Hutchinson on Developing the Power to Endure

Mike: Hey, Mike here. And if you like what I’m doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, and if you want to help me help more people get into the best shape of their lives, please do consider supporting my sports nutrition company, Legion Athletics, which produces 100 percent natural evidence based health and fitness supplements, including protein powders and protein bars, pre workout and post workout supplements, fat burners, multivitamins, joint support, and more.

More head over to www. legionathletics. com now to check it out and just to show how much I appreciate my podcast peeps use the coupon code MFL at checkout and you will save 10 percent on your entire order and it’ll ship free if you are anywhere in the United States and if you’re not, it’ll ship free if your order is over 100.

So again, if you appreciate my work and if you want to see more of it, please do consider supporting me so I can keep doing what I love, like producing podcasts like this. Hello there. I’m Mike Matthews. This is the Muscleful Life Podcast, and I have a newsflash for you. If you can’t endure discomfort, you’re not going to make it very far in your training.

Not to mention your life, because let’s face it, lifting weights is hard, doing high intensity interval training is hard, sticking to a diet, or at least it can be hard, learning valuable skills is hard, burning the midnight oil at work. is hard. Overcoming setbacks is hard. And what’s more, as willpower and motivation are notoriously fickle, when they’re at a low ebb due to poor sleep, stress, angst, whatever else gets us down some days, everything only gets worse.

Harder and that’s why it’s often just the ability to endure that separates the Successful from the unsuccessful in just about every arena of life. Not just Athletics now endurance can be defined in many different ways But my guest in this episode Alex Hutchinson is has an elegant one, and it is the strength to continue despite an increasing desire to stop.

Even if you aren’t an endurance athlete, I’m not for example, understanding how people find the physical and mental stamina and grit. to finish marathons and other more extreme endurance events can help you reach more of your own finish lines both inside and outside of the gym. In fact, one of the reasons why so many people enjoy endurance exercise is because of how it empowers them to be able to struggle through hardship of any kind.

And that’s why I invited The one and only Alex Hutchinson back on the show to talk about this. Now, in case you are not familiar with Alex, he is a New York Times bestselling author of several books, including his most recent one, which is called Endure. And he’s also an award winning science journalist.

He has a popular column. for Outside Magazine called Sweat Science. If you Google that, you’ll find it. And he has quite a few highly informative articles on all kinds of things over there. And he’s also a former physicist and national class runner and just a nice guy. And in this interview, Alex shares many of the insights that he gleaned from researching and writing his book Endure, including how the brain influences our physical and mental limits, how elite athletes Fleets were able to exceed these limits, how to recharge after intense effort, including what he likes to do himself personally and more.

So let’s get to the interview. Alex, you have returned. It’s been a while, man. Thanks for taking the time to come back on. 

Alex: Yeah, thanks Mike. It’s great to be back. 

Mike: Yeah. So the reason we’re here is because of your latest and greatest book Endure. And it randomly occurred to me. I was looking over people that have been on the podcast in the past and whose work I like.

And you stood out because oh, Alex has a new book and it’s a very popular book. And it’s also the, some of the things we’re gonna get into are things that I haven’t really. Talked about much or written about much because endurance has never really been my thing personally and really my wheelhouse in terms of has been in my wheelhouse in terms of student educational side of things.

So I’m excited for the conversation because I also, I do know that I have a fair amount of people in my orbit who care about this stuff. It’s just never been something that I’ve dived into. 

Alex: Fantastic. And I will make the self serving argument that endurance is a much broader concept than people often think about it.

That when I, I started, I’m a, for everyone who doesn’t know, I’m a distance runner, right? Like I, my, my thing is running long distances and I started out to write a book about that. But the more I tried to put my finger on what is endurance? How do we define it? How do we encapsulate what it is I’m talking about?

You realize it just get the circle gets bigger and bigger. And I ended up like I have a chapter in the book called muscle, because if you want to know what the limits of endurance are, you have to know what the limits of strength are. Can the proverbial, woman with a baby trapped under a car, can she lift the car?

And if not, why not? And if so, why? And I ended up with this really broad definition of endurance, the struggle to continue against a mounting desire to stop. So I will make the grandiose claim that this book is for everyone. 

Mike: Let’s just take that and run with it. So can the proverbial mother lift the, everyone’s heard that.

And I’ve heard I couldn’t go into it any more than I heard that it’s simply fake news. Basically. It’s just like a, like an urban legend. 

Alex: Yeah, I think it’s fake news, but with a, with maybe a kernel of truth. And if, so when you dig into the literature, you find that all these sort of scientific sounding references to what’s sometimes called hysterical strength, and people have been talking about it for, centuries, they not centuries maybe a couple centuries.

And it’s certainly once people discovered electricity, there was this sense that if you give yourself a shock, your muscles are contracting with a strength that you could not possibly reproduce voluntarily. And there’s also this whole sort of like insane people and drowning people. They have quote unquote, superhuman strength.

And so people started doing really good experiments. It was taken for granted. Let’s say 80, 90 years ago that this was true, that if you could truly contract all your muscles at the right time, with full strength, you would be able to. perform feats that would make people swoon. But in, in the 1950s, people started doing careful experiments where they’re like, okay, let’s see how strong you are now.

We’re going to zap you. And we’re going to see whether we can use, electricity to make you contract your muscles stronger. And the general finding, and that continues to this day, people are still doing these experiments is that when you contract a single muscle, as hard as you can, you’re getting probably.

typically about 95 percent of what’s there in the muscle. So there’s, there may be a little bit left on the table, but not a ton where things get a little more complicated is that if you’re doing something like a deadlift, you’re not just contracting one muscle. You’re contracting like 17 muscles in a fairly sophisticated combination that keeps you from, falling over backwards.

And that combination may be complicated enough that It’s very hard to really max yourself out under normal conditions because you’re being careful to do it properly. And that may be under extreme conditions, the baby under the car, you’re able to just say, ah, screw it. I’m gonna, I’m gonna contract all 17 of those muscles as hard as I can.

We’ll see what happens. And I don’t care if I break something or pull something or snap something. And so there’s various experiments with the Soviet weightlifting team back in the sixties where they claimed that, a world class weightlifter. Could get maybe 80, 85 percent of his true maximum strength in a competition.

I tracked down the guy who wrote some of those studies. Who’s now lives in Pennsylvania is in his mid eighties, is still actually contributing to research. It’s so where did you get these numbers? How did you calculate 80, 85%? He’s I don’t remember. 

Mike: That’s like the worst answer.

Alex: You wrote a textbook on this. I am quoting you your textbook. You put numbers in there and you’re like, I don’t remember. Okay. Yeah, thank you very little. So sorry, that’s a long rambling answer, but the basic answer is no, you can’t just double your strength, but there’s no doubt. And we, we know this from experience too, that under Conditions of extreme stress.

You can probably get some sort of bump. And so if you talk about the specific example of lifting a car, the other thing is, it’s okay, people can deadlift a thousand pounds, but a car weighs 3000 pounds. So it’s impossible. It’s no, you’re not actually lifting the car over your head or anything.

You’re lifting up one axle of the car. And the car has shocks, which is helping the first, so what you may be doing really is just taking the weight off the shocks enough that you can pull, that someone else can pull the person from under the wheels. So you get some pretty well witnessed, I looked through the news reports and there, there’s some pretty well witnessed events where someone’s under a car and then someone isn’t.

But it’s not that this person is like cleaning and jerking the car, it’s that they’re taking some pressure off by lifting up the bumper maybe from one corner. So they’re really just lifting one corner of the car up enough that someone else can pull the person out from under it.

Mike: Yeah. Which is maybe several hundred pounds. Still a lot of weight, but not several 

Alex: hundred even. And this is not like Grandma Jones. This is the one that I found most reliable. It was this one in Arizona in about 2006. And the guy who reportedly did it, it turns out he’s deadlifted 750 pounds in the gym.

And after this event, he drove home and noticed that he had six cracked teeth. He had been, gritting his teeth so hard while lifting. So this is a guy who could already, under verifiable conditions, be deadlift deadlifting, 700 and something pounds. 

Mike: Yeah. Yeah. I was just going to mention that also if somebody doesn’t really spend any time in the gym and maybe has never dealt with it before, they also don’t know how strong they are.

Some people are just naturally stronger than others. And so what might seem to them, some great feat of strength, which seven, 800 pounds is a great feat of strength period. That’s ridiculous. But your average, I couldn’t see your average person being able to do that under any circumstances ever, but let’s say we’re a few hundred pounds or something like that that they were lifting a log off of somebody or moving a log or something, but if they had never deadlifted before, and I know someone, for example the, a friend of mine was there to see it.

The first time he ever deadlifted was four, five pounds. It was four five pounds, the first, and so my friend was deadlifting and this other dude came up, had never deadlifted once in his life, and was like, Hey, can I try that? And my friend was like, you don’t know you don’t want to try that. And he’s yeah, whatever.

And he got one rep. It was his form, you didn’t know about form. So his back was bowed and it was cringey, but it doesn’t matter. He picked up 400 pounds for the first time. And ironically, he went from there to so he found out he obviously has super freak strength and his brother’s a freak too.

As far as strength goes, so he’s like, all right, I’m super is lower body in particular is pulling. So then he went off and he trained for a bobsledding. Cause I guess that’s, I guess that’s what they look for. And he has the, he has, that’s where it’s actually smart. I thought it was like, I thought I admired how he went through.

He’s okay, this is how my body is built. This is a limb length. And this is what I’m really good at. This is what I’m strong at. Yeah. What could I do with this? I’m not an athletic person. I’m not going to, he’s already, he was in his twenties or whatever. I’m not gonna, I’m not gonna get skilled enough at any sport that requires a lot of gross motor skills.

And he like narrowed it down to bobsledding. He’s actually, I think I have a chance at that. And I have to ask where he went, but he was. Making progress as far as I know, he was like getting up there in terms of his strength with the Olympic guys. And so it’d be funny to see if that ever works out for him, but imagine him.

Again, if he had never done that before, you didn’t know that he’s strong and he’s in a situation where now he thinks that he just hulked out and tripled his strength by moving that log but not really, actually, he’s just a strong dude. 

Alex: Yeah, absolutely. Personally, I’m just hoping that if I ever witness a bike accident, I’ll be strong enough to lift a bike off somebody.

But we all have our goals. 

Mike: I think you need a deadlift a little bit more, my friend. 

Alex: Yeah, I think so, too. 

Mike: So let’s talk about performance and the brain. How is our performance limited by our brains, which it ties into what we’re talking about here, that there are Actual physical limits of strength and their perceived limits of strength.

Let’s just go back to, let’s say, endurance in the way that you defined it because it could apply to strength or other things. 

Alex: Yeah. In a sense, this was the sort of fundamental question that I wanted to try and explore if not answer while writing the book, which is, when you push as hard as you can, or you’ve gone for as long as you can, you reach that point where you’re like, that’s it.

I can’t keep going, or I can’t go any faster. I can’t sustain this pace. What actually is holding you back? And the sort of the traditional answer that people that I grew up with as a runner and that the physiology, physiology text will tell you is there’ll be some combination of it’s your VO two max.

It’s your, your lactate threshold. It’s the your core temperature, your breathing rate, whatever your ability to get oxygen to your muscles. There’s all these sort of mechanical things as if the human body is like a very complicated car, like 

Mike: a quantifiable hard stop or quantifiable hard stops.

Alex: Yeah, you reach your limit because that’s the limit in the same way that if you try and pour, a gallon of milk into a one gallon bucket, it’ll fit. But if you try and pour a gallon and a half, it won’t fit because that’s as much as it can hold. And the reality for people who test their endurance on a regular basis, it’s not if I go out and run a mile tomorrow and then I go out and run a mile again a week from now, I won’t run exactly the same time.

And in fact, there’ll be quite a bit of variation. And it’s not just the weather. And it’s not just that I’ve gotten fitter or less fit. It’s like every race is different. And so this sort of argues against this idea that there’s some, we’re just a set of pipes and that’s endurance is a plumbing contest to deliver oxygen to your muscles.

And the fact that in big races, your motivation is different and you can push harder. So you get this sense that actually, Maybe it’s the brain that determines where your limits are, maybe it’s the brain that decides when you should stop and this is, this has been the sort of the big theme in exercise physiology in the last 10 or 15 years, it’s been, oh, wait, we’ve spent a century learning about the body, but we’ve left out the brain and try to understand how the brain dictates how close you can still think of your body is having ultimate physical limits, but on any given day, your brain decides how close you’re going to get to those limits.

And it may be, and the idea is, Basically, it’s trying to protect you. It’s thinking if you get to those limits, you die, or, maybe you die immediately, or maybe it was just bad in an evolutionary context that if you were chasing an antelope across the Savannah and you just kept going until you keeled over, you didn’t make it back to the campfire that night to pass on your genes.

So nobody really knows the real answer, but the practical outcome is that ultimately, if you do any sort of test of endurance and you reach your breaking point. The only there is no physical thing we can measure that will tell you where that exactly where that breaking point is, it will be determined ultimately by your brain.

Mike: And what are some of the factors that go into the limiting by the brain? What are some of the, what are some of the things that ways to, because anyone who has. Played sports for a while or worked out for a while has experienced that, that especially when you’re doing something consistently take working out just for a lot of people listening, where you do one exercise one week with a certain amount of weight and you get a certain amount of reps and it feels a certain way.

And then the next week you, maybe you’re not even increasing the rate. Maybe your programming is, you’re trying to do actually the same thing you did last week. And now it just feels a lot harder and you simply can’t. Do it when there doesn’t seem to be any obvious reason why, you know? 

Alex: Yeah, and the classic example of that actually is there’s all these studies where it’s like you bring a guy into the weight room say lift as many reps as you can in this and Sometimes it’s a female experimenter and sometimes it’s a male one and they people can do more when it’s a female experimenter And no one’s surprised by this like we all understand this but if you stop and try and say what’s the physiological change?

Why because you’re trying as hard as you can when the male experimenter is there, but somehow you find a little more when the female experimenter is there, depending on the person, right? Like it’s, obviously there’s lots of variations, but this is a simple illustration of the fact that, explain that to me in terms of what’s going on in your muscle fibers.

Your muscle fibers don’t know that it’s a male or a female. There’s something in your, basically in your brain’s response to the people around you. So that’s an illustration of the fact that there are a billion things that go into this how your brain sets your limits. And, but the simple way of thinking about it is that ultimately the master switch is your subjective perception of effort.

And it sounds a little bit like circular reasoning because what I’m saying is, 

Mike: yeah, because when you’re saying your, it’s wait a minute, are you saying the brain’s a perception of effort? Yeah. And 

Alex: ultimately what I’m saying is that Something will, you will reach your limits when it feels like you’ve reached your limits.

And it’s duh I know it feels like I reached my limits because I reached my limits, but what I think what I’m saying, and I hope I’m not kidding myself. I think what I’m saying is a little more profound than that, that the only variable that tells you when you’re approaching your limits is your subjective perception of effort.

And so in the lab, they often measure that with something called the Borg scale. And it’s this scale that goes bizarrely from six to 20, where six is basically you’re lying on the couch and 20 is you’re screaming for mercy. And it’s not a scale of pain or anything, it’s a scale of effort. How hard is this?

How hard do you have to work to keep doing what you’re doing? And when you get to 19 out of 20, you are going to stop very soon what you’re doing. No ifs, ands, or buts. Now, what determines what’s a 19 out of 20? We can’t stick a probe into your brain and say that’s a 19. The people are working on that, but for now we can’t stick a probe into your brain and say, Oh, he’s experiencing 17 right now and 15 now and 19 now.

But we know we can do experiments that Mess with your perception of effort and we can see all the things so some of them are the obvious ones in an endurance context It’s like how hard you’re breathing what your lactate levels are You know how tired your leg muscles are all these sorts of things will contribute to your sense of effort But there’s also a whole Other set of environmental factors that will contribute to your sense of effort independent of what’s going on in your muscles.

And so I mentioned one, like if it’s a female versus a male person standing beside you and cheering you on, but there’s all sorts of other ones. There’s crazy experiments they do with flashing subliminal images of smiling faces or frowning faces on the wall. People are doing a, an endurance test on an exercise bike.

They can’t even see them. It’s like a 10th of a blink. It just flashes up, but the smiling or frowning faces change your mood a little bit, change your perception of wellbeing. And if you’re feeling a little better about the world, you’re more like your effort is a little lower. You just feel like things are a little easier.

And so in, in the cycling study, they’re able to keep cycling for 12 percent longer when there’s subliminal smiling faces flashing on the wall. So there’s all these ways that we’re not really aware of that are altering our perception of how hard a particular task is. 

Mike: Don’t watch the news before you go to the gym.

Alex: Yeah. Yeah. The thought, when I read that study, the thing that I thought is I’ve always rolled my eyes. You go to a gym and they have just the cheesiest motivational posters, people climbing mountains and saying, the journey, not the destination or blah, blah, blah. And I’m like, why, who pays attention to those things?

Then I thought maybe subliminally that stuff really is getting me into the right headspace. Even if I’m laughing at it on the surface, maybe it’s changing my mindset. Yeah. Because otherwise, I don’t know why people invest in those posters. But anyway, 

Mike: I doubt there’s much science though, into the 

Alex: maybe intuition is smarter than science.

Maybe people can tell that it works, so who knows? 

Mike: And that is imagination. And then science follows. Exactly. Hey, if you like what I am doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, and if you want to help me help others. More people get into the best shape of their lives. Please do consider supporting my sports nutrition company, Legion Athletics, which produces 100 percent natural, evidence based health and fitness supplements, including protein powders and bars, pre workout and post workout supplements, fat burners, multivitamins, joint support, and more.

Every ingredient and every dose in every product is backed by peer reviewed, Scientific research. Every formulation is 100 percent transparent. There are no proprietary blends and everything is naturally sweetened and flavored to check everything out. Just head over to legionathletics. com and just to show how much I appreciate my podcast peeps use the coupon code.

MFL at checkout and you will save 20 percent on your entire order if it is your first purchase with us. And if it is not your first purchase with us, you will get double reward points on your entire order. That’s essentially 10 percent cash back in rewards points. So again, the URL is legionathletics.

com and if you appreciate my work and want to see more of it, please do consider supporting me so I can keep doing what I love. Like producing podcasts like this, what are some ways that elite athletes are able to exceed these limits? Like what separates, so you have, let’s say two people of, for all intents and purposes, these are, they have top genetics or whatever it is that we’re talking about.

They are physically very similar, but one of them is just able to. physically outpaced the other one. One’s able to, let’s say they’re neck and neck in the race. And then one of them is just able to pull ahead. 

Alex: Yeah. And there’s some great examples of that historically, like one of the great distance running rivalries of about 20 years ago was two guys an Ethiopian guy named Haley Gaber Selassie and a Kenyan guy named Paul Turgat.

And they were the two greatest distance runners in history at the time. And they had all these amazing duels where they were just stride for stride. The 2000 Olympics was It was a classic example where they ran just side by side for the last part of the race. And they were always separated by just a fraction of a second.

And it was Ghebre Selassie who always beat Turgat. And it’s they’re so close to each other that physiologically, you’re never going to tell the difference between them. But for some reason, Gabriel Selassie had just something that allowed him to just always dig that one step deeper and get to the line.

Just dip to the line a little sooner. So what was that man? If I knew I’d be bottling it and selling it, but there, there is some, so people have different personalities, right? And some people are just. More willing to suffer than others, but there’s definitely a ton of evidence that regular training changes your ability to tolerate pain and you can get better and better at it.

So there’s a ton of studies that look at the pain tolerance and the pain threshold of well trained athletes versus the average person. And what they find is that, so you can do this, you can, for example, you can there’s lots of pain protocols, but the one they use a lot is your upper blood pressure cuff around your arm really tightly cut off the blood.

And then you have to do, you clench your fist over and over again, and you’re not getting any oxygen. So very quickly it gets very painful. So you see how many fist clenches can you handle? And if you compare athletes with non athletes, you find that they have exactly the same pain threshold. So the point at which they start saying, Hey, you know that, that hurts.

It’s the same. So everyone’s experiencing the same pain. But if you ask what their pain threshold is, which is how far can you go till you say, stop, I can’t handle it anymore. Then the athletes are just miles ahead of, often twice as much as the ordinary person. And this, this isn’t something they’ve trained for.

Nobody’s well, nobody, to my knowledge, sits there with a blood pressure cuff and clenches their arm for the heck of it, but it’s something that they nonetheless their general ability to tolerate discomfort, which they build up through pain or through training allows them to enhance their pain tolerance.

So I think there’s something to be said, and there’s data that suggests that if you experience discomfort in training over time, you’ll get better and better at it. It’s not that you don’t feel pain. It’s that you develop the psychological strategies to, to cope with it. Yeah, exactly.

To endure, you learn, you start to think of pain as information. Instead of being like, Oh my God, I feel pain. I’m going to die. You’re thinking, I feel this pain. This tells me that I can’t keep doing this indefinitely. Here’s how much time I have left. I know I can pick it up a little bit, or I know I need to back off a little bit.

It should be, it becomes non, a non emotional source of information instead of this panic signal. And and people, there’s lots of different techniques you learn to distract yourself from pain and things like that too. 

Mike: Yeah, in peak performance, Brad Stolberg and Steve Magnus, they talked about that and some of the strategies that top athletes use to distract themselves from pain and go through that kind of internal monologue when they’re feeling pain and to avoid a panic and to avoid it from spiraling out of control mentally.

Alex: Yeah, absolutely. That’s a great book. And it does a really good job of taking that specific finding and making the link to other parts of life. Cause I do think these are generalizable at this, it comes from endurance sports, but it’s something that absolutely applies in other athletic contexts and also in other life contexts.

When you’re doing, when you’re doing something hard and, facing adversity, you learn these tools to not panic at the first sign of trouble. 

Mike: You segwayed for me because that was going to be my next question is how does the physical ability endure just this is more, it’d be probably a mixture of your opinions, your thoughts, and then whatever science would be applicable, but what are your thoughts on how the ability to physically endure.

And to go through pain to experience discomfort maybe if we’re talking about life, it might communicate more clearly if we were to say discomfort, some things are clearly painful, but a lot of things that we experienced are not painful per se but uncomfortable. So how that, is there a carryover?

There is, can you, by getting better at enduring physical pain through physical training, would that then theoretically improve your ability to push through discomfort and other areas of your life? 

Alex: Yeah. So the anecdotal answer that I’ll start with is yes, absolutely. I, I 100 percent believe that.

And I think. Most people I know who’ve gone through serious training, a hundred percent would affirm that it has carry over into other areas of the life. Like you said, this is a little harder to, I don’t have studies where it’s like people who have run cross country in college are better entrepreneurs or whatever, like those things are harder to quantify.

But I think for me, what it comes down to is this going back to this idea we’re talking about before about effort as the central switch in a sports context. It’s not that you’re the fundamental skill. You’re learning is not to, put up with the pain of lactic acid. The fundamental skill you’re learning is.

to persist, even when your subjective perception of effort is getting high. That perception of effort is something that’s real in athletic context, but it’s also what dictates whether you choose to exercise in everyday life. It’s whether you choose to keep studying late into the night before a test or keep working on a presentation, even after you’ve gone over it.

10 times or whatever, that what you’re dealing with there is your perception of effort is getting higher. And you have to decide, am I going to keep going, even though my perception of effort is high and it’s telling me that I should stop? Or am I going to just decide, ah, that’s enough. This is getting uncomfortable and unpleasant.

The fact that it’s perception of effort, subjective perception of effort, that is the master switch. I think that’s one area of crossover. The other thing is that there’s a bunch of research showing the interchangeability of Mental fatigue and physical fatigue. 

Mike: Yeah those are interesting research.

I’ve written about this. 

Alex: Yeah exactly. And it’s intuitive to us, but the size of the effect is so remarkable that yeah, a little bit of cognitive work changes your physical performance and similarly cognitive. 

Mike: You want, do you want to give a couple of, you’re going to give an example there. I didn’t mean to cut you off on that.

I was just commenting because people listening may not have come across what cause I, it’s just in articles, Some people read articles. Some people don’t. 

Alex: Sure. Yeah. And so the sort of seminal study in this area was in 2009 and basically it involved people sitting in front of a computer for 90 minutes, which is not a long time in terms of how long most of us sit in front of a computer.

And they did some fairly simple cognitive sort of tasks, letters flashing on the screen. You have to hit a button depending on which letter it is and so on. Not hard but just takes sustained focus like proofreading a document or something like that. And then after 90 minutes, they hop on an exercise bike.

and do an endurance test. And they do way worse. And what’s remarkable is that their subjective percent perception of effort, which again is this sort of master switch that determines what you’re capable of. It was higher right from the start. So as soon as they get on the bike, they’re pedaling at a preset power.

And when they’ve been in front of the computer, For 90 minutes, they’re saying, Oh, this feels like a eight out of 20 or something, or nine out of 20, whereas when they are just fresh or when they’ve been sitting watching a TV show instead of actually, having to focus, they’re like, yeah, this is six or seven out of 20.

So there’s this, they’re just sitting there. So you would think that it shouldn’t make any difference, but immediately it’s much, much harder. And then there’s actually, it goes the other way to the, there was a study that actually just came out in the last week or two where they looked at. athletes who were training hard and pushing to the point where they were overreaching.

And then they did cognitive tests and brain scans on them and found that in this particular study, they found that it changed their ability to wait for delayed gratification. So when they were given choices do you want 10 bucks now or 50 bucks in six months, when they got physically tired, they were far more likely to take the easy answer and say, just give me my 10 bucks now.

So our minds are affected by physical fatigue and our bodies are affected by mental fatigue. So I think the takeaway for me is that the line between mental fatigue and physical fatigue is paper thin. We’re talking about fundamentally the same thing, which is, are you willing to struggle to continue against a mountain desire to stop, whether it’s in sports or in business or life?

Mike: What are your thoughts on? Recharging your batteries after, let’s say, a bout of intense effort and because, I’m thinking of it’s a trade off of, let’s say, working out early in the morning, right? That’s what I like to do. And I like to get out of the way. It also, I think it’s a good way to start the day.

I start out. The day in a good mood and I just tend to enjoy my work more having worked out early, but let’s say, and I’ve experienced this in. So let’s say I’ve had a tough workout even today, although I guess my work hasn’t been too taxing today because it’s been a lot of. Proofreading actually of like sales pages and sales copy and stuff.

But so let’s say I have a hard workout in the morning and then work that I feel is more draining is probably writing. This can be pretty draining as you’ve probably have experienced. Oh 

Alex: yeah. 

Mike: Yeah. It just takes a lot of focus. It takes energy to and anything creative really that it takes.

I think that’s one of the more mentally taxing things you can do. And so extended, extended period of. Of writing and then other more cognitively demanding activities, marketing related things. I’ve noticed that as well again, because it’s a creative, we really have to get into a mindset and come up with ideas and work through decisions.

So what are your thoughts on? Let’s say in a day there are three blocks of things that are going to be pretty demanding, whether it’s physically demanding or mentally demanding, what are some strategies for, again, just recharging in between so we can bring, maybe it’s not going to be the same as if whatever we start the day with might always be our best in terms of what we’re really able to bring to it, but to improve our ability to perform well, cool.

Let’s say again if it’s three blocks of intense effort. 

Alex: Yeah. That’s a, oh, that’s an interesting question and I think there’s a lot of moving pieces there. So one thing I would say is zoom out and say your ability to tolerate those three blocks is gonna depend on. A lot of things that are going on in your life, did you get a good sleep last night and the night before and the night before?

Are you eating well? So if you’ve got these sort of very basic sort of ground zero things under control, and if those three blocks that you’re doing are consistent with the workload that you’ve been able to maintain over previous months. Like it’s not, it doesn’t, you haven’t been just lying around on the sofa for months and then all of a sudden you’ve decided to get serious.

That, so those are two, two very different things. If you’re used to doing hard physical work and hard cognitive work, and you’re, you’ve got your life in balance, then you’re in a much better position to be able to bounce back from a hard workout and stuff. And I think my general advice would be that probably the first thing you do is going to be.

The best, but there’s an exception to that because it depends on how hard the workout is. There’s a kind of, there’s a curve for workouts. And if you do a moderate workout, you’re probably you’re, there’s a reasonable amount of evidence that your cognitive performance is going to be better. Your attention is going to be better for the rest of the day or at least part of the day.

So I also work out first thing in the morning. That’s my pretty much invariable pattern. Part for a variety of reasons, some of them are logistical, just I, I don’t want my day to get busy and all of a sudden I don’t have time to work out. Partly I just like it. It’s a good way to start the day, but also I think it sets me up for, to be better at those demanding cognitive blocks, to have gotten some fresh air, to have gotten the blood flowing, to have gotten a bunch of brain chemicals flowing through my brain that are the consequence of exercise.

There comes a point I, and a couple of times a week I do much harder workouts and those workouts that probably don’t set me up to be at my like peak, best, best in, in the hours afterwards because I’m exhausted and that’s a trade off I’m willing to take, right? So that, that requires some planning.

Those workers are hard enough that I could, even if I wanted to, I couldn’t do workouts that hard every morning. So it’s not like it’s screwing up my entire week, but so I’m thinking a little carefully about my week in terms of, okay, Tuesday morning, I’m meeting my friends for a really tough workout at, nine o’clock at 11 o’clock.

I’m not going to expect to be, solving, Einstein’s relativity or whatever. I’m going to be doing some things that are useful, but I’m going to be cognizant of that. And, beyond that, it’s really just the obvious things of refueling after Or around workouts. It’s not like you have to.

There’s a specific time you have to refuel, but your calorie intake has to be in proportion to your calorie burn and not all. Not like at nine o’clock at night. You’re gonna be, Oh, man, I had a huge day today. I better have three big max or whatever or even three, kale salads with grilled whatever you want.

You need to be taking in calories when you’re using them and that’ll help you. That’ll maximize your benefits of being able to combine multiple hard things across different domains in a given day. 

Mike: Yeah. I found that eating, it’s one of the reasons why I like eating more smaller meals throughout the day, and then I’ll eat more calories at dinner, which one, when I’m, once I’m at home, I’m done working for the day.

And so I prefer to eat more calories than just because there’s, there is a bit of lethargy, even though I’m just eating like. Nutritious stuff, but there still is a bit of lethargy that comes after eating a fair amount of calories and whereas throughout the day, I like to keep my meals smaller, probably in the range of, I don’t know, 500 calories or so, a few, 500, a few 500 calorie meals by the time I get home and.

Those are also usually just protein. There’ll be like I have a salad at lunch. There’s vegetables, just more complex carbs, stuff that again, I’m not, I, my body does pretty well with carbs, so I don’t know if it would really matter if I were eating more quickly digested things, but that, that’s definitely as has helped for me, it just has helped, it helps keep my energy levels stable, which then also just helps with focus and attention.

And having a large reserve of it or a large reservoir to pull from throughout the day. And something else that has helped for me is periodic breaks. I know a lot of people talk about this, but a lot of people don’t do it either. And for me, I like, I’ll take 15 minutes after a few hours of work in the morning, I’ll go out before we jumped on this interview, I go outside.

So I’ll go out in the sun. Walk around for a bit, just 15 minutes. But sometimes I’m surprised that if I’ve been heads down for several hours, let’s say writing where I’m like I can use a little bit of a break, just go outside for 15 minutes, walk around and come back feeling pretty refreshed actually, and ready to get right back into it.

Maintaining good sleep hygiene. Very important. I totally agree there. It’s, I think we know that, but again, a lot of people don’t make that a priority because that means ultimately. Usually just means less netflix and that can be unacceptable to some people 

Alex: Yeah, and it’s there really should be a law that like, you look at advanced fitness technology You know your heart rate variability monitor and your cryoton or whatever You should not be allowed to use those if you can’t prove that you’ve already been having eight hours of sleep a night for at least Two weeks.

It’s don’t waste your time looking for pennies when, there’s a big pile of cash sitting right in front of you, take care of those like you said, the eating things. And I think that getting outside is absolutely fantastic. Like I, I consciously try to have an errand to run most days, so that I have to run up the street or walk up the street on a nice day and mail a letter or pick up, something that we’re missing for dinner or whatever, and on, on one level, it’s man, that’s inefficient.

You should have just bought everything on Monday or whatever. But on another level, it’s like you said, you all of a sudden you feel so much better after that 15 minute walk to whether it’s just to chill out or to run an errand. I have the sort of Puritan guilt complex. So I like to to have an errand to give myself the justification for getting out there sometimes.

Mike: I know what you mean. We’re every minute that you’re not doing something that has an explicit Purpose or goal. You feel like, what am I doing? Why am I doing this right now? 

Alex: Exactly. What did I do to deserve happiness? This is crazy. 

Mike: And you’d mentioned something earlier, which was the idea of essentially pushing your limits.

So the more work capacity you have, basically the more you can continue to expand it. And I just wanted to comment on that because yes, anybody has experienced that, Let’s say in the gym, right? That’s one of the fundamental reasons why you would periodize your training is to make it consistently harder over time and overreach and then pull back and then rinse and repeat.

But I do think there is something to be said for that also just in life and experiencing discomfort and being willing to. Push yourself a bit further, not to the point where you, in this case, it would be like maybe have a breakdown or burnout or something like that, but be able to push yourself to where you are aware that this is getting hard now.

But, maybe you’re like, I’m going to keep going. That’s fine. But where, that’s where you really, it starts to feel like a grind. And then over time though, you find just like how it is in the gym that your rate of perceived exertion, right? Your RPE goes down with the same workload. And, we probably just as we all have physical limits, we only, we don’t need to get so far in our.

In our workouts, the same could be said for in our lives, no matter how much of a workaholic or how much of a grinder you are, there is only so much you can do until you’re, your work is, it’s, you’re not even getting, you’re just treading water at this point but I think that for many people.

They can endure a lot more than they’re currently dealing with, even though what they’re currently dealing with might feel like it is overwhelming almost, or they might think that they could not take on more, and I guess that also goes beyond just work, right? Because life puts pressure on you, and to make any area of your life go anywhere, there’s It takes effort.

And you feel like you are being stretched in all these different directions and you are having to fight a war on eight different fronts. But the more you do it, the better you get at it and the more comfortable you get with it. 

Alex: Totally. And I just wanna pick up on, on something you said there that want to emphasize that I’m not I’m not a fan of like Japanese office culture , where it’s if you use my book, you’ll learn how to work 18 hours a day, then 19, then 20 hours a day, and eventually you’ll just wanna jump outta your office.

You, you too. That’s not the goal of life 

Mike: on the way home. 

Alex: Exactly. And whether we’re talking about, sport I think we, we understand this in the sports or the exercise world more that it’s like, you can’t just go and lift as hard as you can every day, all day and expect that to work.

We know that you have to periodize your training. We know you have to incorporate recovery. And so I think when we generalize this out to the rest of life, the same rules apply that. The goal here isn’t to work harder all the time and to have it be on this gradual escalator where you can deal with anything for, it’s to, to understand that when it’s time to work hard, you can probably work harder or push harder than you’re aware of, but you have to intersperse that with, and ideally that will free up time for you to also Relax and recover and enjoy the times in between and so the goal is not to is to get away from this kind of monotone existence or, whether it’s in work or in your personal life where you’re always going hard.

You’re never recovering. You’re never really digging deep and to get back to a sort of Peaks and valleys kind of approach where when it’s time to roll, you’re ready to roll. And when it’s time to relax you, you make time to relax. 

Mike: How does that look for you in your life outside? The training is pretty straightforward.

Again, like a lot of people know that, but then don’t think about, they don’t view the rest of their life through that lens or they don’t want to, because they feel like there was like one of those Arnold Speeches where it was basically was saying, any minute, if you’re not, if you’re not working, somebody else is so get to work.

Alex: Yeah, exactly. You know what? And I’ve thought a lot about this in the last couple of years and I’ll give a shout out to a couple of books that people might find interesting that have had an influence on me. One was called the nature fix by Florence Williams, which was all about how important it is to get outside.

And there’s very deep and science backed ways that it alters your, your state of mind and your physical health. And another is called good to go. The strange science of athletic recovery and what the athlete and all of us can learn from it by Christie Ashwandan, which came out earlier this year.

It’s about, it looks at the science of recovery, athletic recovery, which is a bit of a fad these days are a big topic these days. So nature fix. One of the things that I read that book last year, and one of the first things I did, I put it down and I went. Got in my car, went out and bought a secondhand kayak to stick in my garage because I live about a block.

I live in a big city, Toronto, city of four million, but there’s a river a block and a half from my house. Now I have a kayak because I thought to myself, I need to incorporate brakes and I need to, it needs to be not like I’m going to go on a big canoe trip once a year. That’s great, but I want to, once a week, I want to go and spend half an hour just paddling.

For one thing, get a little upper body exercise. It’s always good for a runner, but also just spend some time on the water in the trees. And, refreshing my mind and I do that during business hours, like I have young kids. I got to be around in the mornings and the evenings. So if it’s like 10 in the morning and it’s like prime work time, it’s okay, I’m still going to go and I’m going to go have a little kayak.

And I actually started playing Tuesday afternoons. I now play tennis with an old friend. Buddy of mine from high school and I found a Friday night pick up basketball game sort of rock climbing. So I don’t know. I’m not trying to make it sound like I’m just, having, a barrel of laughs all the time.

It’s like you 

Mike: just don’t work anymore. That’s the solution. Exactly. 

Alex: Now you know why I haven’t figured out what my next book is but in all seriousness, it’s like I’m serious about success. Like I want to work hard and I want to do good work. I find great value in that, but I don’t want that to be all that my life is about.

And and I also think that. Making deliberate time for fun and healthy activities is better for my work in the long term. And it’s going to enhance my chances of doing really high quality work tomorrow and five years from now and 10 years from now. So that’s something I, in a 

Mike: funny way, it might sound like you’re just indulging your whims, but I’m with you on that.

And I have my own commentary on, I went for a long period of time without doing much. In the way of fun, just ’cause that was all about work and some work, some aspects of work are fun, but a lot of aspects are not, especially building a business. I probably would have more fun honestly if I were just writing books because I truly do enjoy that process and I do also enjoy building businesses, but less so just, I just do also then comes with.

A number of things that are not fun. You just got to do them. And so it’s interesting how somebody hearing that might think that, you’re just you being lazy, but it could be the way that you’re saying it doesn’t sound like it is. But in some people, sure, it could be just like they’re running away from work.

That’s their version of procrastinating. But if it’s not, if it’s not that it actually, It requires, and I’m sure you’ll understand this and people who are very oriented toward work will understand it actually requires a lower time preference to do that than it is to just do more work because in the instant gratification can very much be.

Just do more work, especially when that work produces something quantifiable like words on a page. You are getting closer to, finishing your next project. Whereas going out and kayaking, it’s hard to quantify what’s really the output of that. What did I really what? No, you’re investing into the system, so to speak, and you’re investing into the long term.

Knowing that by doing that, and I’m sure in the beginning, it felt a bit weird to you to go at 10 a. m. to go kayaking. You’re like, all right, this is what am I actually doing? But to do that is in a funny way. It actually takes it’s not the chasing the instant gratification. 

Alex: Oh yeah, and I’ll tell you it still feels I still like you’re 100 percent on when you’re saying that it’s the easier thing to do would be just keep working.

That’s the default state. That’s natural. That’s it feels right. You feel proper. But so I’ve made a deliberate decision. I’m seeking out these opportunities and I’m trying to I’m like whipping myself say don’t skip it out. Come on, get out there. I know you want to hit this deadline. If you start not doing these fun things, you’ll get back to where you were a couple years ago, where all you were doing was running because that’s what you’ve always done as exercise and then working.

And that, so it’s it’s, I don’t know if it’s a sad statement on adulthood or a sad statement on me, but it takes effort to make time. To have these opportunities to have fun, to get together with friends, to, to whatever, play tennis or go climbing or whatever. This is not what happens automatically.

It’s not like I’ve got all these opportunities to go and goof off and I’m fending them off and just accepting a few. It’s no, I’m working hard to make those opportunities to sustain those relationships with friends. So that unlike when you’re 15 years old and it’s just life is one, big goof after another.

It’s as an adult and as someone like me and I suspect like a lot of your listeners who are driven and pursuing success, that’s great. And that’s important. And that, you can’t just throw that out the window, but I’m concluding that for me, it, at my current state, there’s a lot to get out of these.

Breaks these recreational opportunities, both physically and mentally. And so I’m making an effort and it is an effort. It’s not just falling into it. 

Mike: Yeah. I, myself that’s why I took up golfing. And so I was living in Florida for a while and I got into golf for that reason. I was like, all right, I want to have one activity that I just do for fun.

And I guess I took it a little bit of the fun out of it by. But I guess that’s my personality. It’s if I couldn’t get good at it, I wasn’t going to do it anymore. So it was, there was a condition there. It was like this theoretically could be fun if I can get good. What’s good. Let’s quantify that.

Okay. Good is essentially a handicap of 10 or under. So if I can’t get to a handicap of 10 or under giving it a few hours a week within a week, it’s a handicap of 10 or under. Year and a half, two years. I’m probably not going to want to continue because I don’t like sucking at things. And and then it dropped out when I moved to Virginia and it was just replaced with work and I recently last six months or so put it back in just for that reason.

And I had to force myself quote in that there were definitely times where I’m getting in the car to go to the course, and I’m thinking like, should I just stay home? I could work on that next whatever manuscript or I the never ending list of things to do. Yeah. And I’d be like no.

Start the car, let’s go. And then get there. And then be glad that I, once I’m there and I’m then having fun and be glad that I’m. But I’m doing it so I can totally relate to that. Did you find that incorporating some fun into your life affected it in ways that you didn’t expect? 

Alex: Yeah. 

Mike: Did you start sleeping better?

I know I’ve just heard from other people who have gone through this same process and they were surprised and they’re like, Hey, I’m sleeping better and I have less anxiety and whatever. 

Alex: Yeah, in a sense, it was a little bit the opposite for me in that I was expecting miracles from it. I was, I was reading these books, like I mentioned, like the nature fix.

And I was like, okay, I’m going to start doing these things and I’m going to grow two feet and I’m going to, get 50 points smarter on the IQ test and everything. 

Mike: Oh, you violated the cardinal, you made the cardinal sin of life, which is high expectations. 

Alex: Yeah, exactly. The good news is that they pretty much, I didn’t grow two feet but I think the, for the most part that they were born out in that.

I just feel a lot better. Like I’m less stressed about things. I’m happier. I’d have to ask my family, but I suspect I’m a better dad. And at least, maybe not a worst husband. I don’t know. That’s always a tough delicate question, but yeah, I think it most importantly, it just made it made a difference to my mental well being.

I can’t quantify if it made me a better worker. I probably, it may well be that it’s a wash that I’m spending less time, producing as good work. That’s as good as I was doing on more. I’m more efficient at my work, is what I’m trying to say. So these things were important. I think one of the things you said about getting over that activation hump where you think I shouldn’t do this, then you get there and you think I should.

That’s one of the things that I’ve taken away from running over the years is that when I’m trying to quit or trying to cram running into my life, there’s always 20 more reasons that I shouldn’t go for a run on a given day than there are reasons that I should. And what I’ve learned is going out for the run.

is not optional. I’ve just made that not I go out for a run six days a week, and that run can be five minutes. If I’m too busy, if I get up for a run and I’m just like, no, I have so much to do. I can’t do this. And I’m, my legs are tired or whatever. I, for whatever reason, I can turn around at any point.

And sometimes I do, because sometimes I really am up against a serious deadline, but not, 99 times out of a hundred, I get out there and I’m like, you know what? My life is not so busy that I can’t spend 20 minutes or 30 minutes. Or sometimes 40 minutes or whatever, like you realize you get away from the glare of the computer screen and you realize I’m not that important.

I can stand to have 20 minutes of peace and quiet and outdoor time. And then you get back and life is better and things just seem a little more under control, but you have to make that commitment initially because you’re going to be. You’re going to face the initial barrier that when you try and start it up, you’re going to be like, Oh, wait, but look at all these emails.

Holy crap. I have to answer them all. 

Mike: Yeah. And I think that’s also something you said for just keeping the habit in place. There’s value in that, even if it is just five minutes. Okay. You don’t want to make that a habit of making it just five minutes, but I think there is value just in the fact that you did it.

And so then the next day, when it comes time to do it, it’s just going to be a little bit easier to go do it than if you didn’t do it. And that I think the ultimate goal when we’re talking about habits is to reach that point when you know, with certainty, it’s going to happen. There’s no way it’s not going to happen.

Maybe it’s not going to be the best. It doesn’t have to be necessarily a workout. It could even be a date night with your wife or like it’s friday night or whatever or thursday night or whatever it is. Like it’s going to happen Maybe we’re going to be tired. Maybe we’re not going to be in the best mood Maybe it’s not going to be the best date, but it’s going to happen and by Keeping the routine in place, even if it means that you didn’t go for as long of a run as you normally would, or maybe it was you were slower or whatever, there is value in just the fact that you got out there and did it right.

Alex: Absolutely. And I think to bring it back to something we were talking about earlier, mental fatigue and the sort of knock on effects of cognitive load, it’s like sitting around deciding, should I go for my workout? Shouldn’t I, should I do this? Should I do that? I should come on. And, That wastes bandwidth.

And so that’s one of the big reasons for me. It’s I don’t, for me, it’s easier to exercise six or even seven days a week than it is to exercise three days a week. Because then every morning I’m like, I wonder if I should go for a run today. Let’s check the weather forecast today. It looks okay, but tomorrow looks a little better, but I’m a little busy tomorrow.

So maybe I should go today. On the other hand, how am I feeling today? Let me, let’s check my legs. Oh, let me put my hand out the window. See how cold it’s dude just go out every day. Just, That time you’re going to waste deciding whether you should exercise and weighing the pros and cons, use that time just go do the stupid workout, and so I think that’s for me, that’s a, everyone’s different.

Everyone is pulled and pushed by different urges. But for me, just skipping that decision making process is such a relief. It’s I know I’m going to wear the same jeans and today and I know I’m going to do my same, do my run and I know I don’t have to think about it. It’s just going to happen.

Mike: That reminds you of. Number of times where I’ve sat down to watch something with my wife. And then I swear, we spend just as much time trying to decide what to watch. 

Alex: And 

Mike: then, but what we decided is we just pick the first thing that, cause we actually don’t watch much TV. So we’ve tried to watch series, but we watched so infrequently that sometimes we’re like, what the hell is going on again?

Like what, so we’ve got to pick something that you can just get one and done maybe a documentary or. Or maybe a movie if we have the time to do it, but just what are we in the mood for? All right. What’s the first thing that looks interesting? Just pick that and don’t look back.

Alex: Yeah. I think the word is satisficing, right? What’s good enough? Not what’s the best. Let’s not find a movie that’s going to blow us off our feet. And we’re going to remember for the rest of our lives. Let’s just find something that’s going to be okay. And yeah, let’s just get it 

Mike: started. Yeah, exactly.

One final comment I want to make, and then we just wrap up is just something you. This is obviously not a theme of this whole discussion. That is the exertion of effort. And I just think that there’s, I don’t know if it’s something you can train or exactly how you get there. But if you can get to the more you can enjoy exerting effort.

Just merely for itself. And I to put that into specific terms, let’s take work, right? And I’m not I’m sure you’re similar. This is how it is for me. I know a number of people very successful who just actually enjoy working for its own sake because it’s a structured organization is a structured activity, and it’s often easy to reach a state of flow where you just Are fully absorbed in it and you don’t have the clacking the voices and whatever is going on in your life Just you know for that period everything just seems aligned and and then and that can carry over into other areas of life where again I just think it’s one of those like meta skills so to speak if you can enjoy Exerting effort.

If you can, if your instinctive reaction toward the idea of having to exert yourself, it’s not ah, okay, come on, I can do this. But where you are actually where you want to do it, everything in life just gets easier. Everything seems to go better. 

Alex: Totally agree. I was at a conference a few years ago where one of the researchers was like, what is the secret to great endurance athletes?

Honestly, I think it’s that they’re benign masochists. That’s the term he uses that they. It’s not like they’re out, stabbing themselves for pleasure, but they enjoy the feeling of a good hard effort. And I think that’s a huge gift, and some people have it more naturally than others, but I think it’s something that everyone can develop, especially if you start to associate effort with effort.

Outcomes that as a runner, you start to associate, Oh, I had a good workout. And then that, you realize that led to good races later. And so you’re like, I want to have more good workouts like that. 

Mike: And then your whole perception of the effort that goes into those workouts changes, right?

Alex: Yeah, it becomes something that you’re like, this is a feeling that’s associated with good things. I like it. I want to feel 

Mike: productive, 

Alex: yeah. And I think I do think it’s generalizable and I think it’s something that again, I’m sure most of your listeners are pretty serious about getting their workouts in.

I think that’s something, a feeling that they can nurture during those workouts that will have payoffs in other areas of life if they can because exercise is one of those areas where yeah. The effort and the outcome, you can see them pretty linearly. If you’re working hard, outcomes in life.

It’s the connection is often murkier, but you can establish that pattern that, yeah, it feels good to do some, not that we want to punish ourselves all the time or anything like that, but yeah, doing some good hard work is satisfying. It’s really satisfying. 

Mike: And especially when it’s.

Work, it’s effort put into an activity that’s organized to produce good outcomes. And of course, so that’s where life, 

Alex: digging a ditch is not satisfying. 

Mike: Yeah. That’s where life can get trickier. But anybody who has been working out for long enough has experienced that too, where you didn’t really know what you’re doing in the gym and you’re putting a lot of effort into something that wasn’t paying much dividends.

Yeah, that’s not very fun. Yeah. But when you are seeing progress, of course, that’s when it becomes more fun. And that is equally applicable to other areas of life. It’s just, it can be more complex. It’s easier to read a couple of books. So let’s just say if it’s weightlifting on workout programming and go do a bunch of squats and see your legs get bigger and stronger.

Cool. Great. But it’s, it can be harder. To what’s the system for having a great marriage and not only is it, even if it’s not necessarily more complex in its fundamentals. Now there are just other elements that come into play, even, emotionality and irrationality and with both people. And so it can be harder.

To just go, Oh, yeah, this is very simple. Here are the here’s the 20 percent of everything out of all the things you could learn about having a good relationship. Here’s a 20 percent that gives you 80 percent and just put your effort into that consistently, and you’ll pretty much have it made. But I still think that is there’s a validity in that worldview, and that’s how it goes with.

I think that could be said of probably every element of life in my opinion. 

Alex: Yeah it’s, I agree. It’s it’s true. It’s just harder to see it. And so you have to take it on faith that this mindset that you’ve learned from your workouts, you can apply other places and just do the work and do your best to figure out where the right places to put the work is.

Mike: Agreed, agreed. And, it made me think of I think his name is Brandon Wiggins. He’s like a famous cyclist, I think. And 

Alex: yeah 

Mike: Bradley, there you go. Yeah. I don’t, I just pops into my mind. And to this point of just suffering, with endurance athletes who can suffer the most is really that’s, that was the, those are the people who win the most and in a press field, Stephen Pressfield in the war of art.

And it’s just like his, that’s when one of his things, it’s he can just put his ass in the chair and just suffer through things. And there’s definitely value in that, but I think that. It doesn’t necessarily require suffering per se to have success, whether it’s in the gym or outside of the gym, but it does require enduring discomfort.

Alex: Yeah. Pushing through against the mountain desire to stop. That’s the key. 

Mike: Absolutely. And so that’s the main things that I wanted to get your thoughts on. And so I really appreciate the discussion. Where can people find, so first off the book, which we’ve mentioned a few times is it’s called endure and everyone can get it wherever books are available.

Alex: Yeah, absolutely. Local bookstores are great, Amazon’s 

Mike: too. Yeah, yep. And where can people find you and your other work and anything else that you want to let them know? Anything new and exciting that you have? We were talking before the interview and you don’t quite know what your project is, but you say you have some ideas that are for me.

Alex: Yeah, watch this space. Sometime in the next 10 years, I’ll get another book out. And I apologize to my editor right now. Yeah, to find me so I write regularly about five times a month for Outside Magazine’s website to the column is called Sweat Science. And actually, the easiest place to find me is on Twitter.

My handle is Sweat Science, all one word. And that’s any books that, or any articles that I’ve written or other stuff that I find interesting, I post there. So that’s probably the easiest place to connect with me. 

Mike: Awesome. Thanks again for doing this, Alex. This was a great discussion. I look forward to the next one.

Alex: Awesome. It was a lot of fun, Mike. I appreciate it. 

Mike: Hey, Mike here. And if you like what I’m doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, and if you want to help me help more people get into the best shape of their lives, please do consider supporting my sports nutrition company, Legion Athletics. Which produces 100 percent natural evidence based health and fitness supplements, including protein powders and protein bars pre workout and post workout supplements, fat burners, multivitamins, joint support, and more head over to www dot Legion athletics.

That’s L E G I O N athletics. com. Now to check it out. And just to show how much I appreciate my podcast peeps use the coupon code M F L at checkout and you will save 10 percent on your entire order and it’ll ship free if you are anywhere in the United States. And if you’re not, it’ll ship free if your order is over a hundred dollars.

So again, if you appreciate my work and if you want to see more of it, please do consider supporting me so I can keep doing what I love, like producing podcasts like this.