NEAT and the Importance of Walking

And I know there's coaches here, like rugby coaches, that will put GPS devices on their guys so they can analyze when they're in the aerobic zone, how deep that is. What about your anaerobics? Are you 10 to 15-second sprints? Are they running five meters? And how many times do they do that? And you can create a custom program for them based on what their activity is. That's cool. That's really cool. Yeah, it's crazy. I know Carl Jennings, who is a pretty well-known rugby coach, is a friend and mentor of mine, and that's what they were doing. They were basically watching through the GPS satellite where their guys were and what their activity was, and he was actually able to create these crazy conditioning programs for his guys, and he's created some of the best conditioned rugby players in the world. so apart from the gps tracking in that is again is it all done through heart rate and pulse rate and yeah that's it you you've got it you've got to use like we use an app called polar beat and then we'll use a polar h10 which i found to be probably the the easiest to use and best chest strap monitor and it'll do all the hrv and the heart rate and all that stuff but then it'll also you can monitor through your training and then i can interpret that data of what zones you're in when you need to be in them. Are you in these zones? Have you too long? Have you created the adaptation you need? Maybe we need to switch you off to something else. Yeah, cool. And all that can be done with, you know, virtually. Yeah. You don't have to be in there. No, all they have to do is send me a screenshot and it has all the summary on the front. I can go, okay, this, this, this. Okay, you've maxed that out. We're not doing any conditioning next month. We're just going to lift weights. It might be something like that. But, or, you know, you're talking about the walks. Like, we encourage all of our clients to walk as much as they can. And the reason is the single biggest factor for maintaining your body weight has been your NEAT, your non-exercise activity thermogenesis. People aren't walking. And they've actually, Dr. Ben House, who's a good friend and colleague of mine, he sent me a study. It was the first study to actually confirm how many steps you need to make that work. And they said at bare minimum you need 7,116 steps a day. Wow. Just approximately. It's funny, Tony's bought this watch and this is probably worth weighing into a little bit as well too. I think it's a Garmin and Tony's a smart girl and she was studying for hours over Christmas just working out how to use it. And I know you were saying that a lot of the functions on watches that they claim talking on sleep and all the rest of it are not accurate. But steps, that's accurate. That's accurate. That's a really cool thing. Or it's accurate enough. Yeah. And you can put – we use an app. I like to use the Argus app, and it's almost like Facebook for training. So you can friend people, and then you can look at what they're doing and see how many steps they've had. If they're logging in their other stuff, you can see how much coffee they've had, tea and water. And from a trainer's perspective, I probably shouldn't say this because then my clients are going to be going, oh, my God, that's how he knows that I haven't gotten all my steps today. I can look at my client's stuff and make sure they're getting their steps, and if not, I can call them and be like, why haven't you gotten all your steps? And then they're like, fuck, does he get cameras? How does he know this shit? So 7,000 steps a day, if that's what you kind of need, how much time is that actually spent walking? Would you estimate? So what we'll typically do is have people put a pedometer app like the Argus app, and then I'll say just keep your phone on you all day, and then what I want to see, I want you to average out, if you say 7,000 steps a day over seven days, I need you to do 50,000 steps a week. Right. And if you don't get it in Monday through Friday, then on the weekend you're taking a couple of big long hikes, and you're going to make it up. Right. And by and large, we get people, we've got women that are 120 kilos plus that are losing three or four kilos a week once we get their need up. Right. And it's crazy. And one of the things that they found too is the people with the lowest need, your hypothalamus controls a lot of your hunger and satiety and things like that. They found that the people who are really inactive and not actually getting out and walking, their hypothalamus told them to eat more. they would have a, when they ate, they ate more per meal, and they were never satisfied. And from a dieting perspective, if you're trying to diet to lose body fat, you have to have meal satisfaction. If you don't have meal satisfaction, and that doesn't necessarily mean you've eaten enough or eaten too little, your brain controls whether you're satisfied or not. So if you're getting up from a meal and you're like, well, that kind of sucked, all you're doing is obsessing about the next meal because you're going to want a meal that actually satisfies you. so that people who are more active are better satisfied when they eat why that's just what the science says i'm not sure but the hypothalamus controls all that the hypothalamus is you know it's like the thermostat yeah it controls the hormone called neuropeptide y if you want to know about the itty gritty of that or you know basically that's a that's a neurotransmitter that controls your your appetite and the classic study when they did this on rats was they injected them with neuropeptide by and they ate the food despite it giving them an electric shock. That how much they crave food if this hormone was too high in the brain And that upregulated by inactivity Inactivity and excessive carbohydrate eating And opposed by cholecystokinin Yep, cholecystokinin and all those things. And what encourages that? That's the same sort of thing, but it actually does the opposite. So it actually says you're satisfied, you've had adequate calories, we're all cool, and you don't need to eat now. It's cool. You can see that a lot of this stuff obviously interrelates and overlaps.