Why was the face of 24 Hour Fitness so out of shape that he got out of breath going up the stairs on his way to work out there?
When you tutor enough teenagers, you come to notice a recurring pattern in how many parents and students engage with schoolwork. It’s a recurring cycle of feeling like things are under control and then a panicked freak out around some crisis. Again and again, Katie O’Brien and I get urgent calls in the run up to finals from a parent we’ve never met who is begging us to come in and turn a grade around. We’ve worked some miraculous turnarounds with students mastering so much in a couple of weeks that they save their transcript. Sometimes though, the level of academic neglect that has happened throughout the semester is such that it’s too little too late.
So, when Tony Molina talked to me about my own health choices, I had the distinct sinking feeling that comes from having your own good advice handed back to you. Although Tony was talking about eating, health and fitness, the basic pattern was one I recognized all too well. He was telling me that the same sort of consistent work that sets students up to succeed was what I needed to be doing with my own health.
All too often people think of academic and fitness neglect as being a result of laziness or a failure of will. Working with students, I’ve come to realize that laziness is really a symptom of something much more fundamental and fixable: students don’t know how to take control of their educations or why an education matters to them. All too often parents and teachers standing on the sidelines encouraging students to work harder through the some mixture of encouragement, criticism and threats of a future filled with poverty and “missed career opportunities.” When you’re a teenager, missed career opportunities isn’t something you’re worried about. You’re focused on high school. And, frankly, that’s how it should be. You can’t control your career when you’re a teenager. All you can control is what you are doing today, especially in a world where entire industries are being disrupted out of existence by technology. Any career plans a high school student makes today are virtually guaranteed to be irrelevant soon enough. Rather than arguing with students about whether they will use math or essay writing in their future career, we refocus the point of school as being about school being about how to master new and unfamiliar content quickly. As Alvin Toffler put it, “The illiterate of the 21st Century will be those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.” School is about becoming the kind of person who can handle whatever is thrown at you with the full knowledge that an ever-changing world will require constant adaptation.
However, humans don’t adapt unless they’re put under some pressure. It’s when they’re forced to perform that they deliver. The same applied to our biology. The whole point of exercise is to challenge our systems so that our muscles are forced to grow and our cardio-vascular system becomes stronger. Working in education, you come to realize that most people’s practice is incredibly vague.
“Go away, moooooom! I’m studying.”
“I’m doing my best!”
“I am studying. I studied for five hours last night!!!
This last one is my absolute favorite. Parents constantly confuse time spent “studying” for commitment. In practice, we all know what happens all too often when that bedroom door gets closed for “study time.” In The Straight-A Conspiracy, Katie O’Brien and I included the following diagram:
While taking breaks in doing a homework assignment is inefficient, taking breaks in the middle of my workouts means I’ve actually been negating the point of the workout for years. In my 20s, I used to go workout at 24 Hour Fitness. I’d show up. I’d do the elliptical because that was the fad machine that put less impact on your joints. I’d crank up an audiobook and put the machine on the highest setting and crush that elliptical work out for 45 minutes to an hour. And yet, clueless as I was, I knew something was off. Because walking up the stairs to the gym, I’d get out of breath. Clearly, that 45 minutes of elliptical wasn’t doing much of anything for my body. Mostly, it was doing something for my feeeeeeeelings. I felt like I was working out. And then, there was the reality. I was wasting my time.
And here’s where we have to ask a super basic question: why do humans get out of breath when they workout? Well, it comes down to something very simple: you have an energy system that needs oxygen (aerobic) and one that doesn’t (anaerobic).
When you start doing something physically challenging, you’re using both systems. But then, at some point, our body can’t get enough oxygen to use both and so you switch into using just the one that doesn’t need oxygen. The question is when does that switch happen for you? How far can you run before you start wheezing, panting and doubling over? When do you reach the limits of your aerobic system? For me, the stairs on the way up to 24 Hour Fitness were enough to do it. This was especially embarrassing because shortly after moving to LA I booked a series of commercials as the 24 Hour Fitness Cheerleader.
So, for a while, I’d wheeze my way up the stairs and walk through the door to see a cardboard cutout of myself there as the poster child of fitness. Whoops! Good thing so much of the gym business is about selling memberships to people who never use them. I was the walking contradiction of the fitness industry.
Was this 24 Hour Fitness’ fault? Nope. I didn’t know how to make sense of the signals my body was sending me. Constantly, I was being sent Small Data. When I got off the elliptical and did something actually challenging I’d get quickly get out of breath and stop. Only thanks to Tony Molina do I understand why this was utterly counterproductive. I was denying my body the signals it needed to rewire itself.
Elite athletes train at altitude for a reason. They are putting their bodies in an environment with a low partial pressure of oxygen. It’s when your body gets down to a low partial pressure of oxygen and is kept there that the body is forced to change itself. Achieving this while working out at sea level is very hard and you probably can’t go train at altitude so what’s a body to do?
Well, there is a simple solution: Intermittent Hypoxic Training or IHT. Fully computerized IHT units can cost $60,000, however, there are cheaper at-home units that come in at a few hundred dollars.
The unit sets you up to rebreathe the air you exhale. It’s an elegant system because your body uses up oxygen and that green canister scrubs out the oxygen you breathe out. Meanwhile, attached to your finger is a pulse oximeter which measures your blood oxygen. Amazingly, you’re able to take your blood oxygen down to levels that would normally only come from rigorous high altitude exercise. IHT has been shown to provide two to three times the aerobic benefit of physical exercise. Best of all, you can do it while you watch TV.
While it would be nice for all of us to go train full time at high altitude like a professional athlete, that’s not realistic. Most of us are trying to fit physical fitness and long-term health around school, work and family. Anything that can give us two to three times the aerobic and cardio-vascular benefit of strenuous exercise is not something that is personally beneficial, it’s something that could save us a fortune as a society. The longterm consequences of a body that isn’t properly maintained is that some system will fail. Arteries will clog. Strokes and heart attacks result. Simply telling people to exercise and eat right isn’t working. We not only need more specific guidelines, we need to bring the most powerful techniques to bear that can fit within the constraints of people’s lives.
For now, IHT isn’t a mass market solution. There will need to be competition to both improve the convenience and reduce the costs of the units. As economies of scale set in and as more and more people adopt the innovation, a virtuous cycle will begin. And part of that virtuous cycle is what happens when you start to feel good during workouts. I know how terrible it is for my students to show up to school everyday and feel nothing but failure and obligation. It’s the feeling I’ve had for years and years at the gym.
Neglecting your schoolwork for most of the semester and then trying to turn things around in a last ditch effort when a crisis occurs doesn’t work very well. It works even less well for health. Fitness and education aren’t about a series of stop-start sprints, panics and crashes. They’re about developing a consistent lifestyle. I’m pretty good on the education part and need a lot of work on the health part. And yet, in both, there’s no room for complacency. It doesn’t matter where you are in any aspect of your life because you always want to put the white belt back on.
