Changers Interview #1

Dick Talens, Fitocracy

Reposted from the Sessions blog.

I first started hearing about Fitocracy in 2011. Friends in New York kept talking about these two guys who’d created a game around fitness that hundreds of thousands of people were playing.

In the two years since, Fitocracy has grown from thousands to millions of users, emerging as a sprawling, thriving online fitness community for everything from Couch-To-5k and #YouAreYourOwnGym to Lifting for Women and Leangains.

Fitocracy is a difficult thing to explain. It gained traction as an RPG for fitness, using people’s workouts as a way to gain points and level-up. But in the same way Foursquare gained traction as a city-game and went on to uncover something much more powerful, Fitocracy has become not just a place to track workouts but a community to share, prop, discuss and optimise them.

It’s not for everyone, but for those who get it, Fitocracy is more than an app or forum, it’s a lifestyle.

There are people who proudly tell other people they are Fitocrats. And they spend an average of 4 hours a month on the site, checking in at least every other day.

For the people like K-Beast (body-builder) and FlowerofAsgard (tennis player) on top of the leaderboard, with hundreds of thousands of Fitocracy points, this is a place they call home.

Fitocracy has done what Caterina did with Flickr, Zach and Jake did with Vimeo and the team at RapGenius is doing right now, they created their own world, with its own rules, conventions and religions.

The only way to understand it, is to go and lurk for a while in a group, watching what people share and interact.

What you’ll find is something that’s proven extremely difficult, getting people to naturally and repeatedly engage in a conversation about their health.

I’ve spent some time with Fitocracy’s co-founder Dick Talens in recent months and grown to appreciate the depth of his understanding for behaviour change.

Dick’s a lightning rod, entirely unafraid of stirring the pot by posting brotastic articles like ‘How I Got Ripped At 500 Startups’ or delving into the underlying psychology of strength in a guest-post on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s site that sets out:

Time and time again, I’ve found that those who make successful transformations tend to be self-compassionate. They forgive themselves for their past failures so that they can try again.

While Dick and I probably diverge on the aesthetics of health and fitness, we could not agree more on the necessary elements of successful behaviour change.

Dick’s concept of fitness ROI is one that will gain traction in the years to come and his ‘ humility, compassion and mindfulness’ framework for body transformation is powerful and refreshing.

In this, the first in a series of interviews with health and behaviour change experts, Dick outlines the non-obvious traits of healthy people, the ‘fitness ROI’ thesis and his ideal 45-minute workout.

How do you explain Fitocracy to your Mum/Mom?

My mom’s a bit of a fangirl, so she’s actually already on Fitocracy and catching up to me in levels... Not sure if that says more about her or less about me.

How close right now are you to your ideal body? Or, at the least, your ideal physical self?

I’d say I’m about two thirds there. For me, it’s more of a personal goal than anything — I’d really be comfortable with my own body even if I never hit that.

When I first started fitness, my body was something that I was ashamed of, but now I’m pretty comfortable in my own skin.

You say you’re “about two-thirds there”. If you got ‘there’ what would that look like? How would it be different to where you are now?

I’d be about 10 lbs of muscle and 10 lbs of fat less. I’d look almost like I do right now, just with more defined abs.

In ‘QS is BS’, you wrote:

“…most of today’s Quantified-Self devices get users to “move more.” In reality, however, “moving more” does little to affect a person’s weight. One meta-analysis examining cardio concluded that “isolated aerobic exercise is not an effective weight loss therapy.”

That may be true, but aren’t you discounting the value of all the other things exercise brings?

Good question. So just to clarify, in the example above I am talking purely about weight loss, since I consider obesity and weight loss to be 85% of fitness “issues”. When it comes to weight loss, all exercise might seemingly bring value at the most atomic level, but that doesn’t mean that they’re always good for one’s overall health.

Running, for example, is great for cardiovascular health, but I think that some people — not all because everyone is different — actually diminish their chances of losing weight by running. The reason is that fitness is a complex system. Each action has an opportunity cost and impact on your motivation, resources, other actions, etc.

The metaphor that I like to use is this.

Think of your body as a startup.

As a startup, every hire will bring some value just because of the sheer fact that diminishing returns haven’t kicked in yet… Hiring a social media person will add some value. So will a marketer. So will a CFO. But that doesn’t mean that you should hire any of these roles, because you have a fixed pool of resources. In startups, these fixed resources are your budget and management time. In fitness, these resources are your willpower, self-control, motivation, time, and money.

But if you need engineers, would it make sense to hire a social media person if it puts you past budget? Absolutely not. Sure, that hire might add value overall (hey, just like cardio is healthy overall), but making decisions like this will kill your startup.

So what do most startups do? They hire engineers, because that yields the highest ROI. Similarly, most people would do better to incorporate a strength training regimen of progressive overload.

Also — to your ‘QS is BS’ quote above — how do you parse that fact with the research that shows a strong link between activity and weight.

So, the linked study doesn’t necessarily disagree with me. It’s looking at a very specific time of activity — i.e. NEAT. (Which is, corny enough a really neat phenomenon).

Calorie-burning activities from NEAT is very different from activities from intentional exercise. When it comes to intentional exercise, additional movement may spike hunger and cause people to overeat, both for physiological and psychological reasons. I believe that there was one study that asked participants to exercise, then took them to a buffet and asked them to “eat as many calories as you think you burned off.” Those people ended up eating 3x that amount or more.

NEAT is different from exercise in that it’s spontaneous and non-intentional. It’s additional movement that accumulates throughout the day, and interestingly enough, acts as a protective measurement against obesity in some people. There was an experiment called the Vermont Prison Experiment in which prisoners were overfed a ridiculous amount of calories. Think 6,000 or more calories per day. Some of the participants gained a lot of weight, and some of them gained very little, even if that caloric intake was probably twice their daily requirements. Now there are a few reasons for this, but one of them is that NEAT is upregulated in some people during a state of overfeeding.

I’m really into your Humility, Self-Compassion and Mindfulness framework.

Can you give me specific examples of success/failure with your clients for each of those qualities? Examples of where the presence or absence of these traits was critical to someone’s journey of change.

Humility — I have one client, let’s call her C — she was really skinny and wanted to put on weight/muscle. C is a former college athlete, really athletic, picked up things very quickly. Now, with former athletes, you’ll often get a bit of an ego because they think they know how to train correctly. C was different… she absorbed everything that I said like a sponge. The type of workouts that I recommend will rarely have someone breaking a sweat or feeling exhausted, a far cry from most training that athletes are used to. It would have been easy for her to question my methods and why she was only working out for 45 minutes, 3 times a week, and left the gym feeling like she could have done a lot more. But she didn’t, and as a result ended up gaining 10 lbs, going from deadlifting 45 lbs to deadlifting 145 lbs for reps.

Self-Compassion — I teach this to everyone in one of the weight loss groups that I’ve run. Basically, most people in that group have 30% or more of their body weight to lose… and they’ve spent a lifetime trying to lose weight, then obviously hating themselves when they fail. When you aren’t compassionate with yourself, you think of yourself as a failure rather than think of weight loss as a skill — a skill someone needs to learn and practice to get better at. Many people in this weight loss group, because they’re practicing self-compassion, are finally treating it as such. It’s the difference between having a “fixed” mindset vs. having a “growth” mindset.

Mindfulness — A client of mine, Michael, who’s down about 20 lbs and seeing his abs for the first time, is extremely mindful about how he reacts to foods. In the diets that I prescribe, I usually give a lot of options of what you can eat. For example, you can have cookies or pizza, as long as you fit them within certain rules. Michael knows that it’s difficult for him to stop eating after just one cookie, so he stays away from them and sticks to whole, unprocessed foods 99% of the time. For some people, this might be unhealthy mentally, but because Michael is self-aware and knows how he’s reacted to these foods in the past, his adherence is top notch.

Interesting. In the humility example above, C has this feeling that “she could have done a lot more”. Why is leaving something in the tank important?

There’s actually a very interesting reason behind this. Excuse the long-winded answer because it’s a tad complex.

There are certain things that our bodies and brains are good at sensing, even from birth. For example, your central nervous system, with extremely high accuracy, can tell whether or not something you are lifting is “heavy.” This makes sense… If early man couldn’t sense that he was injured, he might’ve gone toe-to-toe with a saber-tooth tiger and become his lunch.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, you have skills in which you can never truly improve. For example, as it turns out “stock picking” is one of those skills, as Nassim Taleb has pointed out.

As it turns out, sensing the ROI on a fitness regimen falls somewhere closer to picking stocks.

The problem is that people falsely couple certain “heuristics” that help them determine if they’re losing weight/improving their fitness. “Oh, I’m sweating and feel like throwing up? I must be making progress!” is what your average CrossFitter thinks. This coupling is engrained so very deeply, that I suspect it comes down to the neurons that are firing in your brain. As it turns out, feeling like crap after a workout is only an indicator that you feel like crap after a workout.

I have beginners leave something in the tank, because when you simultaneously help them make the most progress they’ve ever made, something magical happens. Assuming they are mindful, they decouple these false heuristics from predicted outcome; suddenly you have “re-wired” their brain for good. They’ve now strengthened their positive feedback loop around exercise by receiving results without the unnecessary pain.

Can you identify the non-obvious behaviours of people who you’ve seen succeed with transformation? What little things deliver the highest ROI?

Successful people religiously measure. Now some people might think “What? I thought Dick hated QS.” I do… but I hate the ethos of the QS movement and how it takes away the incredible complexity of fitness being a “human” problem. In reality, there are a few metrics that are very important for most people to measure: weight, waist measurements, your performance on certain lifts, etc. My successful clients are always thorough about recording these and sending them to me.

Ok… are you ready to have your mind blown?

Successful people take measurements with a grain of salt.

Yep, these same clients who measure religiously also don’t really care about interpreting data too heavily. That’s because they build mental models and big stories to figure out what’s happening.

Fitness is an art. It has a human element. If you get caught in the weeds with numbers, then you’ll end up spinning your wheels.

I know many people who geek out over fitness data and have made very little improvement in the last few years.

Along that same vein, one thing you’ll notice about successful vs. unsuccessful people re: fitness is that unsuccessful people think in “rules” or disparate “tips”… e.g. eat this, not that, this food is healthy, this food is not, this exercise is good, etc. Successful people think in mental models, which they build for themselves based on what they learn and read. They have a worldview, but one that is not immutable. They apply a lot of Bayesian thinking in order to govern the rules of these models.

Can you elaborate more on these mental models? ROI is one example. But what other mental models do you see in people who make a change?

Sure, when I talk about mental models, I mean building models about how fitness affects your body, or bodies in general. Here’s a simplistic hypothetical model. Let’s say someone notices that decreasing carbohydrates makes him (personally) lose weight faster. However, decreasing carbohydrates also seem to diminish his willpower and increase his propensity to binge eat. Suddenly, he is able to make a tradeoff and optimize his personal carbohydrate intake for success. See how useful this is? I’ll tie it back to my framework… In order to do this, it takes mindfulness and a malleable world view, which takes means humility.

Hypothetical. I’m a male, 30+. I have a gym membership and 45 minutes, 3x/week to exercise. All else being equal, what’s the highest ROI way for me to spend that time.

I’m interested in specifics (ie. squats over bicep curls), nutrition timing and rep, set and rest ranges.

Monday

• 3 sets of squats in the 6-10 rep range. Decrease 10% of the weight for each subsequent set.
• 2 sets of stiff legged deadlifts in the 15-20 rep range.

Wednesday

• 3 sets of dumbbell bench press in the 6-10 rep range. Decrease 10% of the weight for each subsequent set.
• 2 sets of incline dumbbell bench press in the 6-10 rep range. Decrease 10% of the weight for each subsequent set.
• 1 set to failure of cable or weighted crunches (15+ reps)

Friday

• 2 sets of deadlifts in the 4-6 range. Decrease 10% of the weight for each subsequent set.
• 3 sets of chin-ups (or assisted/weighted chin-ups) 5 reps each.
• 2 sets of pendlay rows in the 4-8 rep range. Decrease 10% of the weight for each subsequent set.

In terms of nutrition, eat at least your goal bodyweight in grams of protein (e.g. If I want to get down to 160 lbs, I’d eat 160g/day), figure out your calories burned/day and eat at a deficit of 300-500 cals (assuming you want to get leaner), and try to save most of your carbohydrates for post workout. :)

OK. Last one. Another hypothetical. Same as above, except this time I play tennis once a week, do the elliptical twice and week and only have 45 minutes a week in the gym. What should I do?

Drop the elliptical. Do my regimen instead now that you have the time. Test your cardiovascular ability in 2 months. Send thank you brownies/cake/cookies my way.