Walk, Don’t Run And Other Important Health Shifts With Mark Sisson

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How is running bad for us? Tennis shoes aren’t doing us any favors. Cold plunges may be overrated.

Mark Sisson is a pioneer in the ancestral health movement, known for his blog Mark’s Daily Apple and the Primal Health Coach Institute. He is also the author of “Born to Walk”. Today, Mark highlights how good walking is for health and longevity.

He also does some myth busting when it comes to current health trends. A former triathlete, Mark has shifted and now recommends walking instead of running, minimalist shoes (or going barefoot) over tennis shoes and NOT cold plunging every day (even though this has grown in popularity). He also reviews how to make the most of walking. And he goes over common injuries like plantar fasciitis and why orthotics are never the answer. His recommended health shifts just may inspire your own.

Watch the video of this podcast on our YouTube channel.

Visit Mark’s website: peluva.com

Join Nourishing our Children

Check out Optimal Carnivore and HydroHealth

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Listen to the podcast here

 

Episode Transcript

Within the below transcript the bolded text is Hilda Labrada Gore and the regular text is Mark Sisson.

Running, tennis shoes, cold plunges, and diet. What have we misunderstood when it comes to cultivating well-being? What have we missed, and what needs to be reconsidered? This is episode 527, and our guest is Mark Sisson. Mark is a pioneer in the ancestral health movement, probably best known for his blog, Mark’s Daily Apple, and the Primal Health Coach Institute. He also recently wrote the book entitled Born to Walk, highlighting the transformative power of this simple practice for health and longevity. Mark does some myth-busting when it comes to what we apply in our lives for a healthier lifestyle.

Mark has shifted and now recommends walking instead of running, for example. He suggests we use minimalist shoes or go barefoot more often over tennis shoes, and he’s not into cold plunging every day, even though this is trending. He also reviews with us how to make the most of walking. Is it better, for example, to take one long walk in the morning or to take frequent walking breaks throughout the day? He also talks about plantar fasciitis and how orthotics are not the solution for that. He also goes over his own dietary shifts and why he started his Peluva barefoot shoe brand.

Before we get into the conversation, I want to tell you about a wonderful resource we have at the Weston A. Price Foundation. It is called Nourishing Our Children. Are you a parent, a would-be parent, a grandparent, or an adult interested in children’s health? Nourishing Our Children is a project of the Weston A. Price Foundation, established in 2005. It has a focus on timeless principles for supporting learning, behavior, and health through optimal nutrition.

Nourishing Our Children has an active closed group on Facebook that offers support on how to nourish and not merely feed your children. If you join, you’ll also have complimentary access to the group focused on adults for a simple donation of $5 for the calendar year. The moderators ensure that no question goes unanswered. Go to Nourishing Our Children Facebook Groups for more information and to join.

In case you’re wondering what it’s about, here’s a testimonial from Catherine Jimenez. “I am a first-time mom of a soon-to-be nine-month-old and a member of the Nourishing Our Children’s private Facebook group. I began this journey with The Nourishing Traditions Book of Baby & Child Care, but I felt I needed encouragement and support in implementing some of the recommended food practices. Joining the group became instrumental in helping me navigate the barriers that I had to giving my baby his nourishing foods. I’ve had so many questions and have been so grateful for the clarifications and answers. My questions are always answered, and I’d say rather promptly as well. Thank you, Nourishing Our Children.” If you’d like to find out more about this group, go to Nourishing Our Children Facebook Groups.

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Welcome to the show, Mark.

Thanks for having me, Hilda. It’s good to see you again.

Undergoing A Hip Replacement Surgery

It’s good to see you, too. When I ran into you last, you told me you had had hip replacement surgery. What’s the deal? That surprised me.

I was a runner back in the early ’70s, throughout the ’80s. I put in a lot of miles on these hips, probably inappropriately, which is something that informed my books later on. I turned 71 in 2024, and my hips started to bother me. I had a noticeable limp as a result of some deterioration in the joint, so I had a hip replacement. That’s nothing novel. A lot of people do that, but in my case, I was so prepared.

I did what we call prehab. I went into this operation with the intent of recovering as fast as I possibly could, so I strengthened my hip muscles. I did some inner and outer thigh work on machines. I did whatever I could on the elliptical trainer to keep the rotation of my hips going as much as I could without any pain. I had the operation on December 3rd. I walked a little bit that afternoon. I walked 1 mile the next day. I walked 2 miles the next day.

 

I came back quickly. My surgeon said, “Don’t go to physical therapy, just walk.” I took his advice, and I just walked. One of the keys to my recovery was the pre-recovery, the stuff I did before the surgery. I had good muscle tone, and then the walking, either barefoot or in special shoes that I make, these Peluva shoes that are five-toed shoes, I could feel the ground underneath me. I could reacquire a balanced, measured gait very quickly without having to wear thick, orthopedic, tight shoes, or things like that. I was 90% recovered within four and a half or five weeks. It’s been a couple of months now. I’m 100% recovered now. I’m doing sprints and chasing after Frisbees and doing all that good stuff.

We Are Born To Walk

I know you love Ultimate Frisbee. Let’s back up a bit. You said that you think all that running did you harm. How so?

Humans are not born to run long distances metronomically every day, day in and day out. This was a real misunderstanding that came about as a result of the anthropology and some of the science. There was a book written years ago by a friend of mine, Christopher McDougall. He wrote a book called Born to Run.

I read that book. I know exactly what you’re talking about.

It’s a great book, and he’s a great storyteller. He talks about persistence, hunters, and chasing after the antelope or the gazelle on the plains of Africa, chasing them down for two hours, and then jabbing a spear in them. That persistence hunting wasn’t seven-minute miles or eight-minute miles outracing the beast in a straight line. It was tracking, stopping, jogging, crouching, sprinting, and a lot of different modalities to finally tire the animal out.

As a result of the humans having evolved a cooling system, this ability to sweat, having evolved a longer big toe, which allows us to cover ground more easily than our ape cousins, and having evolved a longer Achilles tendon, the same thing allows us to bound and spring forward better. All these things together gave us the ability to run once in a while, but mostly, we are born to walk. That’s the thesis of my book, Born to Walk. We are all born to walk a lot, as much as we can, and we’re born to sprint once in a while, not every day, not even twice, three times.

Once a week or so, we were born to sprint because that’s the ancestral pattern, and here we are on Wise Traditions. That was one of the traditions of our ancestors. It was antithetical for our ancestors to take a day and go, ”We don’t have a hunt until Sunday, so let’s go for an easy 6-mile run.” That was completely antithetical to their health. We’re born to walk, we’re born to sprint a little bit, we’re born to lift heavy things, and once in a while, we’re able to run, which is a good thing.

Help me understand where this idea came from that we should be running for health maintenance or optimal performance.

It’s a unique set of variables, a perfect storm of misinformation and bad science that started in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Ken Cooper, a great man, a great doctor, wrote a book in ’68 called Aerobics. In it, he made this supposition that the harder work you did that raised your heart rate, that would strengthen the heart and then that would confer longevity upon you. He was looking at a nation that hadn’t been doing much work and exercising much for the prior couple of decades and said, “Maybe if we all get out and jog a little bit, ran, and worked our heart muscle, we would live longer,” which was an interesting premise, but he recanted much of that a decade later when he said, “Maybe not so much. Maybe I said it was too much, and maybe running wasn’t the best choice.”

Meanwhile, Bill Bowerman and Phil Knight, the founders of Nike in early ’70s were perplexed at the fact that they had these great naturally gifted, genetically gifted runners of the Oregon Track Club who were setting world records and competing on the international scene, but their feet were hurting because the shoes that they had available to them were minimalist shoes. They were thin shoes, and the team wanted to be able to run 80, 90, or 100 miles a week, but they couldn’t because of the footwear.

Phil Knight and Bill Bowerman invented these thick cushioned running shoes that enabled these well-adapted runners with great form to go out and run 80, 90, or 100 miles, and not have the impact and the trauma from that. I ran 120 miles in some weeks. Where it gets dicey is where Jim Fix comes in and writes a book, The Complete Book of Running. He says that running is the best thing you can do. It’s the best form of exercise. Now, we have Cooper’s book on aerobics. We have these thick cushioned running shoes, which enable people with bad running form to not get that immediate jolt of a heel strike.

If you were to run barefoot down the sidewalk and you tried to heel strike or you tried to land on your heels, you’d give up after three steps. You’d say, “This isn’t working.” The new shoes forgave this bad behavior. Now, we have a generation of runners who start running because they think it’s good for them. It’s not. They assume that the more miles they do, the longer they’ll live. Not necessarily true. They assume that it’s a great way to lose weight. Running is a horrible way to lose weight. Most people who engage in a running program to lose weight wind up very disappointed because most of them run at a heart rate that is too high for them to be burning the fat that they want to melt off.

The heart rate is too high.

Yes. Most people run at a heart rate, and they can do it because they’re mostly burning sugar. They’re burning the glucose in their bloodstream. They’re burning the glycogen in their muscles. They’re cannibalizing some of their muscle tissue. Running is catabolic. They get back from the workout, and they’re like, “That was so valuable. I struggled. I suffered. I sweated. I worked out a lot. I’m overheated. I got to sit and rest for a while. I probably can’t go out and rake the leaves, honey. I’m sorry, Tommy, I can’t throw the football with you because Daddy went out and ran 7 miles hard.”

We are born to walk a lot, as much as we can, and we are born to sprint once in a while.

What happens is they don’t burn the fat that they want to burn. They burn the glycogen, and the brain goes, “Wait a minute. We can’t do this. We have to eat to replenish the lost glycogen.” There’s an automatic system in the body that tends to have runners who don’t know how to run well or haven’t trained well to overeat. They overcompensate. Over the years, you see people who’ve been running religiously 35 miles a week, same 15 pounds to lose. They don’t lose the weight, but what they do is they shift their body composition, and they start burning a little bit more muscle and putting on a little bit more fat. Usually, it’s visceral fat or it’s fat around the midsection.

You look at the start of any of these major marathons. There was the Boston Marathon, which you have to qualify to be in, but the New York Marathon before that, and the LA Marathon. Most of the people running a marathon are overweight. If running were that efficient and effective in burning off body fat and having you trend toward your ideal body composition, everybody would look fit, but they don’t. Running is a bad choice.

Just to finish the thought about what happened to my hips, I’m one of those people who put in a lot of miles because the shoes allowed me to put in more miles than I probably should have. That was wear and tear on a joint that was not designed to put in 100 miles a week for 7, 8, or 9 years in a row. Combine that with the fact that I had a very grain-based diet for much of my life. It wasn’t until I was in my late 40s that I realized that grains were causing a lot of my physical issues. I had horrible issues, mostly from wheat, from gluten. I had irritable bowel syndrome from the age of 14 until I was 47. I had arthritis in my feet. I had all the issues that also accompanied the overtraining that I did from running, but they were also a factor of my diet.

When I finally gave up grains, that transformed my life. That was what sent me on this path down The Primal Blueprint and writing about diet and all of the ways in which we can enhance our health by getting our eating right and eating in a more natural way. I think it was the deterioration from the grain-based diet for 40 years. I play Ultimate Frisbee. I do a lot of things that a 70-year-old guy probably shouldn’t be doing, so I had my hip replaced. I’m very thankful that that technology exists because I feel better now. That hip feels better than it did several years ago.

It’s so cool to hear your story. What I like about it is that you’re open. You might’ve been like, “I’m running. I’m always going to be a runner.” You’re a former triathlete. You might’ve been like, “I’m not stopping,” but you’re open to learning. That’s what caused you to shift your diet and your athletic approach, right?

Absolutely, 100%. It wasn’t a light switch flipping. It was a gradual evolution. It took me a while to discover that it was grains. It was a big issue with my diet. The industrial seed oil thing came up later, the inflammation that may result in many of our bodies as a result of overconsumption of those types of oils. All these things evolve into a way of eating. For me, I was an early paleo guy, and then I developed The Primal Blueprint, which was a little bit more forgiving than the paleo program was. I was more accepting of real dairy, for instance, and then it was keto. I was big on the keto bandwagon for a while. I realized I can’t live keto sustainably. I started talking about metabolic flexibility and developing that with intermittent fasting. Now, I would describe myself as a carnivore adjacent.

How Big Is The Running Craze Today

That’s interesting. I love it so much. How many people are still running? How big is the running craze now compared to, let’s say, in the ’70s when all these books were coming out?

It’s huge. People still run a lot. The marathons have more runners than ever before. A lot of people claim to run and want to run. Running shoe sales are through the roof, but the number of injuries has not decreased. Fifty percent of all runners get injured every year. That’s a horrible statistic. Twenty-five percent of all people who claim to be runners are injured at any one point in time. Right now, 25% of all the runners in the US are injured.

This resonates with me. I am not a runner, but I have a friend whose husband is running all the time. Exactly what you described earlier is how he lives. He’ll be like, “I’m so tired,” and he doesn’t have energy for anything. This is a guy who ran who knows how far, and all he wants to do is slump in a chair.

What is he doing it for? Why is he doing it?

I don’t know. I think he’s doing it because he wants to be ripped. He’s 50. He’s like, “I want to be ripped at 50 like a Troy Casey.” He thinks this is the solution.

Not only is it not the solution, but most people who are running that amount would be so much better served dialing their diet back a little bit. Eighty percent of your body composition happens as a result of your food choices. If you get the metabolic flexibility part of it right, you don’t even have to exercise that much to be ripped. Someone that old, I would say, should lift weights. Start lifting weights, and then instead of running, walk.

Walking is a quintessential human exercise. It’s something everybody can do. It is very valuable. A lot of runners say, “Walking, that’s not very valuable. I’m not burning enough calories.” This is not about calories burned. It’s about the movement. It’s about keeping moving and mobility. You’re burning a little bit of fat, but all you’re burning is fat. You’re not cannibalizing muscle tissue. For instance, running is catabolic. Running tears muscle tissue down, which is why every elite runner you’ve ever seen has no meat on their bones. They’ve got legs, but their upper body is skinny.

Running is catabolic. Walking is anabolic. Walking helps build muscle. There are all these great reasons for people who are not running for the purpose of competing. Some people could run. In the book Born to Walk, I say that the only people who should be running are runners. You go, “That’s pretty glib, Mark,” but no. A runner is somebody who is genetically gifted, who is an ectomorph, naturally skinny, with big lung capacity, pretty much a high genetically determined VO2 max, and has a very high tolerance for discomfort or pain.

 

That’s 3% of the population. Everybody else should be walking a lot, and yes, sprinting once in a while. Play your games. Go sprint, but not lacing up the shoes and putting in 45 minutes of struggling and suffering at a heart rate that is too high for you to be burning fat, but too low for you to be developing any VO2 max, aerobic capacity, power, strength, or speed. It’s practicing hurting every day. Why would you do that to yourself?

Making The Most Out Of Walking

To your point about walking, I’ve traveled the world and gotten to connect with indigenous cultures, and it’s part and parcel of their daily life. They’re walking to go get water from the river, or they’re walking to herd animals, not to hurt themselves, but to herd animals. We have to be intentional about it, though, because our lives are so sedentary. If someone is tuning in right now and they’re like, “I’m inspired. I do want to walk. I’ve been pooh-poohing it, but now it’s my time to get in,” how many minutes a day? What time of day? Do you have any guidelines for this thing?

As much as you can fit it in. People will come to me and they’ll say, “Mark, I would love to walk. I get what you’re saying. I don’t have 45 minutes to walk in one lump sum.” I would say, “Do you have ten minutes to walk the dog in the morning? Do you have fifteen minutes to park further away from Whole Foods, go shopping, and then whatever, come back? Can you drop the kids off a mile away from school, and everybody walks to and from school? Do you have coworkers that you can have lunch with? A lunch break is an hour. It only takes twenty minutes to eat lunch, so then spend 40 minutes walking with your friends.”

By the way, the body loves the fact that you walk after a meal. It aids in digestion. Can you walk in the evening with your spouse? The point is, even 5 or 10-minute walks spread throughout the day might even be more valuable than one 50-minute walk because the body wants to constantly be moving. We are born to walk. We’re born to move. We’re born to move a lot. We’re bipedal. Our body expects us to be moving in different ranges and planes of motion as much as possible throughout the day. We’re not meant to sit at the desk. We’re not meant to stand at the desk. We’re meant to be moving.

The people who say, “I got 50 minutes or an hour. I put in an hour of walking, check that off, I’m done. Now, I’m going to sit at my desk the rest of the day. I don’t have to walk. I can think about other things,” that’s something. I would say those five sections of 10 or 12-minute walks spread throughout the day might be a better choice for you.

How Footwear Affects Movement

It’s more attainable. As you said, for the person who’s like, “I’m so busy.” They’ve got to take, as I call it, a sunbreak. Why not take ten minutes and get outside at one point, or after a meal, walk your dog? That’s much more doable for most people’s schedules, I would imagine. I want to go back to what you were saying about the shoes because I’ve interviewed Steven Sashen from Xero Shoes on this show about minimalist shoes and how important that is. How is our footwear affecting our ability to walk injury-free?

It’s a big problem. When I say walk, I also say walk in minimalist shoes. Steven, who’s a good friend of mine, makes a great shoe. Xero is a great shoe. A minimalist shoe is defined as wide, thin, flat, and flexible, wide enough to accommodate a full splay outward of your toes and thin enough that you can feel the ground you’re walking on underneath. You want to feel the sticks, stones, and holes that you step in. The foot wants to feel that. It helps you to orchestrate the entire kinetic chain.

Flat, which means zero drop from the heel to the toe. You want to emulate walking barefoot. Whenever you put on a modern shoe that’s got an expanded, thick heel, you’re raising the heel off the ground and automatically shortening the calf muscle, which then puts more tension on the Achilles, which then causes potential Achilles problems or plantar fasciitis. Wide, thin, flat, and flexible. Flexible, you want the shoe to be able to accommodate changes in terrain, tilt, and texture of the terrain.

It’s almost impossible to roll your ankle if you’re walking slowly when you’re barefoot because even if you’re stepping on a rock sideways, by the time you weight the front foot, the brain has all the information it knows on exactly how much to scrunch the arch around that rock or roll it off, how much to bend the toes, how much to roll the ankle outward so the knee doesn’t get tweaked, how deeply to bend the knee to offset some of the change in velocity, and how much to torque the hip or tilt the hip.

All of this information is available because our feet have 50,000 nerve endings on the bottoms of them that can detect everything about the ground that we’re walking on. By the time you weight that front foot, the brain knows exactly how to organize your posterior kinetic chain. How modern footwear negates all that is, first of all, they’re stiff shoes. You can’t feel the ground you’re walking on, so they’re not flexible or stiff. Typically, they’re cushioned. When I say stiff, stiff and cushioning don’t mean they’re not mutually exclusive. You can have a stiff shoe that’s cushioned, and you sink into it like a BOSU ball. They have arch supports to a fault.

People who wear these shoes with lots of arch supports or with orthotics in them are unburdening their arch muscles of having to work at all. Now, all the muscles in the feet atrophy. When your foot muscles atrophy, that can cause problems later on if you’re barefoot, you’re walking through your house at night, you trip on something, and now, you lose your balance because you don’t have the strength to be able to maintain it. All these things that can go wrong are because of the footwear that we choose in the name of fashion or short-term comfort.

It reminds me of all of our modern interventions. I often say we are sacrificing our health on the altar of convenience.

You said something. I have to write it down, interventions. I’m going to change the word invention to intervention, modern interventions. There’s no more room for modern inventions. Everything from here on is a modern intervention.

Understanding Plantar Fasciitis

That’s right. I wanted to ask you about plantar fasciitis because I feel like every time I turn around, someone is struggling with foot issues, but they might also be unwittingly struggling with a hip issue or a shoulder issue that’s connected to their footwear.

If you only tear the body down and never get a chance to build back, you get burned out, injured, and cease to improve your performance.

Many of these issues are connected to the feet. That’s probably what happened in the case of my hip. My hip dysfunction was a manifestation of the kinetic chain that started with bad shoes. I got arthritis in my knees, so I wore orthotics to prevent me from pronating, even though pronation is part of the running gait. Now that I wasn’t pronating, the stress went further up the kinetic chain to my hips. It’s incredible the damage we can do by putting a wedge here and a shim here and fixing stuff up, but never getting to the root of the problem, the origin of the problem. We should be barefoot. If not barefoot, we should be wearing minimalist shoes.

As you mentioned, I have a minimalist footwear company. It’s called Peluva. We do a five-toed shoe. This is a trail shoe, but it’s got five toes on it. Every toe articulates individually. When you’re stepping on stones and rocks and you’re on rocky trails, you can feel the entire surface of the trail underneath you, and your brain knows exactly how to organize that kinetic chain so that you don’t roll an ankle, tweak a knee, or slide off sideways, and break something.

I have a question because I have friends who got excited and started following my example of getting more minimalist shoes. They were like, “I can’t walk in these,” because maybe, as you said, their physiology was compromised because they were so used to wearing shoes with supports, high heels, and so forth for so long.

One of the things that happened in the early days of minimalist footwear was that when this book, Born to Run, came out, he not only hypothesized that humans are born to run, but we’re born to run barefoot or in minimalist shoes. Thousands of runners said, “I’m a runner. I run 50 miles a week. I’ll get some of these minimalist shoes, and I’ll go out and run 7 miles the first day.” They got injured. It’s a perfect example of how, while they were still capable of running 40 or 50 miles a week, their feet were not strong.

Their feet had been atrophied, and all of the pressure was then being put on the ankles, the calves, the knees, and the hips. Because their feet had been encased in these tight, narrow toe boxes, their arches had been supported with a high arch support, and their heels had been offset with a cushion and then raised up, all of this had gone to creating a dysfunction that when you then start to go back to a more minimalist or barefoot lifestyle, you have to train yourself again. You have to work into it easily.

We tell people with my shoe, “Don’t run in these.” By the way, they’re the best running shoes you’ll ever have if you know how to run, but don’t run in these shoes. Walk in them because you can’t hurt yourself walking. Only walk the first day for ten or fifteen minutes. You get used to it. Get used to the fact that your toes are splayed outward. Get used to the fact that if you have plantar fasciitis, understand that plantar fasciitis isn’t even an itis. It’s not as much an inflammation as it is an osis. It’s plantar fasciosis. Now, an osis is the death of the tissue as a result of the loss of blood flow.

When you take a foot, if that’s the big toe, and then you cram it all together, you cram that big toe against the other ones, then you cut off the circulation on the arch because of that, that plantar fascia region loses circulation, and it dies. It stops functioning the way it’s supposed to. No amount of rolling with a lacrosse ball or stretching is going to fix it. You have to open up the circulation again, which is best achieved by going barefoot, by putting in toe spacers, or by wearing a shoe like Peluva, which automatically splays your toes outward. As you walk, you’re gently and passively massaging your feet because we tell people to look for cobblestones and look for uneven surfaces to walk on. It feels so good. You’re gradually building, relaxing, realigning, and strengthening the muscles of your feet.

This is so the opposite of how our feet often are. As you said, they’re crammed together. Especially with women, we’re wearing our high heels, and we don’t realize the damage we’re doing to our bodies.

The heels look great, but there’s a point at which you have to realize you’re sacrificing a lot of comfort for a little bit of fashion.

The Importance Of Rest And Recovery

That’s right, and maybe it’s causing some long-term issues. Speaking of the need to pay attention to our bodies, let’s talk a little bit about rest and recovery. You’ve already dispelled some myths about activity and what can make us more fit and strong. Talk to us about the need for that rest and recovery.

The only reason that working out, lifting weights, running sprints, even running long distances, for that matter, work is because at the time we’re doing it, we’re doing damage. The body responds by getting stronger as a result, by building back a little bit better. If you only tear the body down and never get a chance to build back, you get burned out. You get injured. You get tired. You cease to improve performance. All of these things can happen because people are overtraining.

Rest becomes a critical component of the training matrix. Yes, train, train well, train smart, and train hard when you need to train hard, but then apply an appropriate amount of rest and nutrition, the amount of nutrients, protein, carbohydrate, electrolytes, things like that, to be able to recover and repair. Theoretically, the next time you go do this, you’re a little bit stronger. You’re a little bit more powerful. Rest has always been there for us to acknowledge, but it’s often overlooked because of the mentality of the last several decades, which is, “No pain, no gain,” “More is better,” and “If my competitors are putting in 15 miles a day, I got to put in 20 miles a day.” That’s not how the body works.

I have to confess, I shortchange myself on the rest of things sometimes. I’ve got one of these sleep trackers, and it used to always tell me, “Your restfulness is low. You might need to take it easy.” I’m like, “Whatever, I would blow past it,” thinking more is better, but that’s not always the case.

Once in a while, you can have training cycles, where you grind it out hard for a week or so. That same cycle, instead of going hard day, easy day, rest, hard day, easy day, rest, is now hard week and then an easy week. You have to match the cycle. If you’re having a hard week, you would want to take an easy week to recover from that. I’m someone who has not lost my power and strength as much as most people my age. What I have lost is recovery.

Once we stop moving, we start dying.

What I used to be able to do in a day, and then come back and do it again two days later, now it takes four days to be able to come back and do it again. You’ve got to be mindful and cognizant of where you are on your journey so that when you do the work, you do it well, you do it mindfully, you do it smart, and then you allow for that appropriate amount of recovery.

Just to be clear, you’re not saying that we need to necessarily recover from activities like walking. That’s something we can include day to day.

When I’m talking about recovery, I’m talking about the hard days in the gym, the lifting days, the leg days, or a sprint day. I tell people, nothing is as effective for your overall fitness and your body composition as sprinting is. People go, “I’ll sprint every day.” No, you can’t do that. If you sprint right, if you sprint appropriately, you better not be able to do it again as hard three days later or four days later, maybe once a week, and then move on to something else. Lift some weights in the gym. Do that hard, but recover. That’s your upper body.

You’re right. Walking is something I do on a recovery day. If I take a day off from training, walking is something I do as a part of my recovery. A great example is bodybuilders. Bodybuilders go to the gym, and they’re lifting heavy stuff, really getting to the essence of what their bodies are capable of doing and not quite breaking down. They would never get on a bike and go ride hard. They would never get on a treadmill and run, but they will get on a treadmill and walk because walking is part of their recovery from that hard workout they did.

Side note that we don’t talk about this much on the show, but what do you think of cold plunging or getting in cold water to help aid recovery and performance?

So much has been said about cold plunging in the last several years, and I’m not convinced. I started cold plunging several years ago in my backyard in Malibu. I had a pool that was unheated, and it would get down to the low 40s, high 40s in the wintertime. I would walk in calmly and hang out there for 2 or 3 minutes and then get out. I was doing that because I was thinking to myself how much I hated cold water. I was trying to overcome my hatred of cold water. It wasn’t about activating brown fat and burning fat. It wasn’t about anti-inflammatory effects.

Cut to recent times, the last couple of years, everybody is talking about the anti-inflammatory benefits of cold plunging. Even in the last few years, new research has come out, which I’ve known about for a long time. If you are in the gym, lifting weights hard on a day, like doing a leg day, the last thing you want to do is get in a cold plunge because you want the inflammation. That is part of the signal that you’re giving your body as a result of the hard work you did, combined with the rest, to build those stronger muscles. If you get in a cold plunge immediately after a hard leg day, you negate some of those benefits. Understand that a cold plunge is an awful insult to the body.

Nobody loves a cold plunge. If anybody says they love a cold plunge, they’re wrong. They’re lying to you. They like having finished a cold plunge, getting out of the cold plunge, the feeling they get, and the euphoria they get from not being in the cold plunge anymore after two minutes. The cold plunge itself, the available benefits, have been oversold to a lot of people. It’s a hormetic stress. I always look at a cold plunge in the context of what the rest of the day looks like.

If you’re an NBA basketball player in the middle of a series, and you had a hard game, yes, get in the cold plunge right after the game. You want the anti-inflammatory benefits because you want to be able to do this tomorrow night and play another series. If you’re a bodybuilder and you get in the cold plunge, you’re not going to do the leg day again tomorrow. You’re going to want the benefits to accrue over time. You don’t want the anti-inflammatory aspect. You want the inflammation to prompt the genetic signaling, the upregulation of the genes that build more muscle, and so on and so forth. The context is huge.

Some people say, “Mark, what if I work out hard in the morning, I go to work all day, I come home, and I cold plunge at night before bedtime?” Look at it in the context of the day. If you had a hard, stressful workout in the morning, you had a long, stressful day at work, you come home, and you have your body undergo another stress because make no mistake, a cold plunge is a stress, you might be accumulating all of these stresses, which raises your cortisol. It is counterproductive to your longevity goals, to your immediate health goals. You always have to look at the context in which you’re choosing to do this type of activity. Does that make sense?

How Mindfulness Can Benefit Overall Wellness

Yes, it makes a lot of sense. I’m grateful that you brought this to the fore. We don’t usually hear this perspective, I would say. I have enjoyed cold plunges for the reason you stated, because it teaches me to be comfortable being uncomfortable. I like challenging myself, but I’ve got to do it in the right context. Speaking of mindset, let’s talk a little bit about how mindfulness practices can help our physical fitness and our overall wellness.

To me, it’s pretty simple. The first thing for me is that I still treat myself like I’m a 32-year-old athlete. That’s how I live my life. I don’t live my life in a protective cocoon about, “I’m getting old, and I have to start watching myself.” I manage risk, and that’s part of the mindset. Mindfulness is knowing where the limits are and not exceeding them. As much as I like to treat myself as a younger version of myself, I also don’t go to the gym and think I’m going to set a personal record on the bench press ever again.

I have a talk that I give in which I talk about people doing their one-rep maximums. After the age of 35, a one-rep max is a binary proposition. Either you can do it, in which case it’s probably not your max, or you can’t do it, and you might get hurt trying. There’s no benefit to doing this self-test to determine a one-rep max. Better that you pick a weight that you can do maybe 4 of or possibly 5 of. If you’re going for heavy, I pick weights that I can do 10 or 15 of.

If the heaviest you choose in the gym as an older person is something you can still do 4 or 5 of, rather than barely do 1 or 2 of, you’re probably going to reduce your risk of getting injured. As an athlete, as a person trying to navigate life and stay fit all the time, injury is the biggest problem. Injury is your body’s way of saying you’re doing something wrong. We should not get it. Do you think our ancestors got injured other than in a battle or by being eaten by an animal? No, they didn’t get an overuse injury from training too hard or whatever. They lived life. Their training was life. I guarantee you, if they got injured, they didn’t last long. They didn’t last long enough to pass the genes along to the next generation.

 

Addressing The Naysayers

I love that. Their training is life. That’s true. In some of the cultures I visited, the older people are still in the mix of all the things, but they’re not going as hard as the younger guys. They’re not at the lead of the pack going after that jaguar. They’re maybe doing some different things and still using their skills and their bodies, but as you say, weighing the risk. Different expectations for them. Mark, what do you say to the person who’s like, “Actually, Mark is getting older and he wrote Born to Walk because he can’t run anymore,” what do you say to the haters?

Haters are going to hate, but I’ve developed such an appreciation for walking as a therapeutic tool. I do some of my greatest creativity, book writing, blog writing, and whatever when I’m walking. I have meetings when I’m walking, so it’s a form of what I would call productive leisure. Speaking of mindfulness and mindsets, it’s a mindset when I’m walking that every step I take, I can feel the ground underneath.

That reverts back to my shoes. The fact that I’m choosing to wear these shoes connects me with the earth. Our feet are our connection with the universe. This is how we connect with the universe, through our feet. I want to get close to that. I want to get as close to natural as I possibly can. If I’m out walking 6 miles on concrete, pavement, or cobblestones, I want the minimalist footwear, but I want my toes to be able to feel everything about the ground. I want to inform my brain of how to orchestrate my kinetic chain. In so doing, I feel a sense, almost with every step I take, that I’m getting stronger and stronger. I’m getting more resilient and more mobile. That never happened to me as a runner.

As a runner, there were a lot of times when it was like, “I’m heading out the door now. I’m going pretty fast. I hope I don’t get injured. I hope I don’t tweak something.” Most of my career, I felt pretty strong, but there was always that potential for something bad to happen. Walking, it doesn’t happen. People don’t get injured walking unless they’re unconscious about what they’re doing or unless they’re wearing bad footwear, which we’re going to come back to the combination of walking, but making sure you’re walking in minimalist footwear.

Mark’s One Health Tip: Walk

I love it so much. I’m eager to get my feet back on the ground right after our conversation here. I do want to pose to you the question I like to pose at the end of the show. If the people could do only one thing to improve their health, one thing, what would you recommend that they do?

What do you think I’m going to say, Hilda?

I think you’re going to say walk.

Yes, indeed. How would I get away with not saying that? Everybody here, my book, Born to Walk, it’s two things. I want to give runners permission to walk again because most runners think it’s not valuable, and I’m giving people who’ve never walked permission because they thought it was not valuable. Overweight people think, “I can’t run because I’m too overweight. My knees hurt, but walking is useless. I’m going to sit here and gain more weight.” I’m giving people who are sedentary permission to start walking immediately. Every step you take in terms of walking will improve your health. Once we stop moving, we start dying.

That is everything. Once we stop moving, we start dying. That is so true. Mark, thank you. On behalf of the Weston A. Price Foundation, it has been an absolute pleasure talking to you.

Likewise, Hilda. It’s good to see you again.

—

Our guest was Mark Sisson. You can visit his website, Peluva.com, to learn about his barefoot shoe line and other resources. I am Hilda Labrada Gore, the host and producer of this show on behalf of the Weston A. Price Foundation. This is a simple reminder. Follow this show on your favorite app. That way, you don’t miss a thing. Please share your favorite episodes with friends. Nothing beats word of mouth for helping people discover this show. Thank you so much for tuning in, my friend. Stay well and remember to keep your feet on the ground and your face to the sun.

 

About Mark Sisson

Mark Sisson is a pioneer in the ancestral health movement, known for his blog Mark’s Daily Apple and the Primal Health Coach Institute. He founded Primal Kitchen, now part of Kraft-Heinz, and co-founded Peluva, a minimalist footwear company. His latest book, Born to Walk, highlights the transformative power of walking, encouraging a return to natural movement for improved health and longevity. With a background in biology and a career as a world-class athlete, Sisson continues to inspire millions to adopt a primal lifestyle.

 

 

 

Important Links

• Born to Walk
• Peluva
• Mark Sisson on LinkedIn
• Nourishing Our Children
• Nourishing Our Children Facebook Group
• The Nourishing Traditions Book of Baby & Child Care
• Born to Run
• Aerobics
• The Complete Book of Running
• The Primal Blueprint
• Feet First – The Weston A. Price Foundation

 

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