Can you just touch on? You already spoke about the four principles or the main principles of Swiss 8? Can you go through the eight principles for us for the listeners? Yeah, so the top four, I mean we call the top four, bottom four. So the top four is fitness, nutrition, mindfulness and sleep. Uh and that we we call those the top four because they are the holistic health, lifestyle principles um that we we asked we try and get people to start with. First build a routine around those four principles and then once you're happy and you're comfortable that all that has become habit and it is a routine. Then we've got minimalism, discipline, time management and personal growth and they basically life hack kind of principles. Yeah. Your what is up guys, welcome to today's episode of the live train performed podcast. I'm your host, Sean Kober. Over the last few weeks we've been running through the pillars of the Swiss Eight model, which is a proactive mental health program designed to Deliver quality content around the eight pillars of health and wellness to people via an app so they can schedule in the most important things of their life to allow them to be better at life in today's episode.

We are diving into all things fitness before I kick off today's episode. However, I would like to read out one of the ratings and reviews that I got jerry from Australia sent in a five star rating and review and the review reads high quality knowledge and application is the title Copes. Concisely ties together traditionally disparate approaches to training and performance. Drawing together knowledge and methods from many facets of science in a complementary fashion. This understanding will improve more than just your physical performance. The result is an extremely well rounded coaching and educational asset. I've been following his content well before his podcast started his consistent, he learns he applies, this isn't a marketer, This guy trains people across all walks of life from old mate, two elite fighters and he does a phenomenal job of it. His philosophies apply to the podcast title live train perform. If you learn even a little bit from codes, you will be profoundly better for it as codes will undoubtedly reference.

It's the other 23 hours in the day that dictate the quality of that one hour training session. Thanks mate. Much appreciated and for you guys are listening to the podcast and enjoying the content. All I ask is you leave me a rating and review and pass this off to your friends and family and anyone else that you think will benefit from this much love guys. So today's episode is all about fitness. Now, what is fitness? I've gone and scour the internet to find out what they determine the definition is. Now, here's the thing, I haven't been able to find a definitive definition of what fitness is and there's a reason for that. However, before I get into what my definition of fitness is, I'm going to read off some of the definitions that I have come across on the internet, Which read off as follows, # one, the condition of being physically fit and healthy. Number two, an organism's ability to survive and reproduce in a particular environment.

Number three. The quality of being suitable to fulfill a particular role or task. Now, whilst all of those are true, I personally don't think that that encompasses what fitness is now. Here's the thing, fitness is different for everybody. Okay, you could have a power lifter who is fit for power lifting and you can have an endurance runner who is fit for marathons. Okay, but that doesn't necessarily qualify them as being fit. It depends on what you consider fitness is, and this is where my definition of fitness comes in, and for me being fit is being mentally fit, physically fit, spiritually fit to live your life how you want to. Okay, that means that you can literally do whatever you want whenever you want, both physically and mentally without being restricted by anything that for me is the definition of fitness, fitness is relevant to your life and your career and what you decide to do with your life.

So, an M M A fighter is going to require different fitness to a soldier who is going to require different fitness to a stay at home Mum who is going to require different fitness too. A rugby player who is going to require different fitness to a social hockey player, who is going to require different fitness to a professional basketball player. The list goes on and on and on. So again, it's relevant to your life and if you can do the things in your life that you want to do whenever you want, that is fitness. Let me give you some examples of this. Okay, I've been hiking numerous times. I did a two week hike around Annapurna circuit which is in the Himalayas in Nepal and we went up to 5.5 1000 m and I was carrying a pack was carrying everything that I needed for the entire two week trip and I was fit enough to do that okay to carry all my shit. Whereas other people weren't fit enough to carry their stuff, they had to hire Sherpas and things like that too.

And porters to carry their stuff. Now granted I am an ex soldier and I carried heavy loads whilst I was deployed to Afghanistan and throughout my entire six year military career I was carrying heavy loads. That was part of my job was to fucking sustain myself for five days at a time and you know, obviously carry all the ammunition and um weapons systems and water and food and um spare batteries and communications equipment and specialist equipment and all that type of stuff. I needed to carry all that sort of stuff. So I was fit for carrying heavy loads over long distances. Okay, so that was specific to me now, if someone wanted to do that hike with us and they hadn't had that experience of carrying heavy loads over long distances for sustained periods, then guess what? They need to train that type of fitness. They need to start planning for that hike and using progressive overload and progressively adding weight and progressively adding time and progressively adding hills in and progressively building that fitness over long periods of time, it might be three months to six months depending on how you're coming into that thing.

Okay, so that's one type of fitness. There's many, many different types of fitness um which we're going to start diving into very soon. But before we do that, most people think about fitness as the physical aspect of fitness, but there's also mental fitness. And here's the thing, just as we train physical fitness, we can also train mental fitness. And this is something that um the military taught me very well. And if you go back and listen to the time management episode and the discipline episode, you know, creating this, um mental fitness is absolutely essential for getting the most out of your physical fitness. I say this all the time is like when your body wants to fail, it's your mind that keeps you going where the mind goes, the body follows and you can see this in everyday life, when people get bad news or something happens, where they take a bit of a mental hit, then watch what happens to their body language, they start changing their posture and they start walking with their shoulders hunched over in their head down and dragging their heels and things like that and mental fitness and physical fitness are directly linked.

And if you think otherwise then you're fucking crazy man, honestly the most physically fit people in the world are typically the most mentally fit and mentally resilient as well. And that is absolutely no coincidence. Okay, you've got to think when you're pushing your physical fitness to the limits and you're testing yourself and you're fucking putting yourself in that pain cave, that mental resilience is what's building as well. You need to have grit, you need to have determination, you need to have good mindset and attitude to be able to push yourself physically through those pain. Barry's into that fucking pain cave and it's only with conditioning yourself with this mental fitness, Can you get the most out of that which will then impact your physical fitness for those of you that have been listening for a while, you will know that I was in the military for six years and when I was in the army, the first thing that we did every morning when we were on base and we weren't on deployment or anything like that, then we would have pt physical training and for the most part this was one of those things that we absolutely pushed ourselves to the limit.

And you know, when I went into recon and snipers into the recon platoon and sniper sell, um these were some of the best soldiers in the battalion and every morning we did pt it was like a competition to see who could um put themselves the deepest in the pain cave. And there was times where we'd finished PT and and I'd be walking back to my car or walking back to the lines, my accommodation or something like that. And I couldn't like unlock the door of the car or the or the accommodation because my arms was shaking so much and I was in such a state. Um and I pushed so hard into a sympathetic state that, you know, I couldn't eat for hours and hours afterwards because I'd hammered myself so much. Um and this built mental resilience, it also built our physical capacity obviously, but um the most I took out of that was the mental component and that was, you know, being in that environment and this is important, putting yourself in a good environment with people that are going to bring out the most in new and I had that environment, I had those people that were pushing me okay now, I look back on that and I say, well I probably could have done things a little bit better um in the physical fitness um, sense wasn't exactly the smartest training were literally just hammering ourselves, but I can't undermine what that gave me in terms of mental fitness and, you know, this set me up for having a successful military career and this set me up for um doing tough, tough missions in Afghanistan where it was carrying large loads for long periods of time.

I recall being um in Afghanistan going out on a five day patrol and you know, my equipment that I was carrying with all the specialist equipment and gear and everything I mentioned previously, my pack was like all the gear that I was carrying was like 70 kg and I weighed about 78 kg at the time. So, um I literally almost doubled my body weight with the amount of equipment that I was carrying and I needed to be mentally fucking fit to do that. Obviously I need to be physically fit as well. But the mental fitness was a massive part of that. Now, here's the other thing, this is where mental fitness comes into play as well. I don't like long distance running, I don't like endurance based running, I find it boring and I just can't get in the groove. Alright. Some people find it meditative. Some people enjoy it. Some people get that runner's high, but for me, I just don't like doing, I don't enjoy it. I prefer to sprint and um you know, do short, sharp bursts, but if I wanted to run a marathon, obviously I would need to train for it, but it's the mental component if I just wanted to run a marathon this weekend, I honestly believe that I would be able to get through that simply because I've built my mental fitness and I've got my reference points and this is a good point.

You know, every time you um do something difficult, you face adversity, it gives you a reference point, and when you've got a reference point, it makes it a lot easier to be able to deal with that adversity that has come up. So, an example of this is um you know, I look at the most difficult thing that I've ever done, physically and mentally, and that was my snipers course, I lost eight kg on my snipers course, I went from 80 kg down to 72 kg, and if anyone's seen me, like, I don't have that much weight to lose. Um so I was absolutely shredded, I had a fucking eight pack and um was just a Whippet, I was super fast and strong and um you know, everything physically fit, but I was also extremely mentally fit, and here's the thing, I look back at that and I'm like, man, that was the fucking hardest thing I've ever done, You know, we were failing. Um it was designed for us to fail to test our mental fortitude mental resilience, um you know, to see how would bounce back to see how we would deal with adversity and physical fatigue and mental fatigue and not sleeping and not getting food and water and still being able to operate etcetera.

So I look back at that and for me, like that's the hardest thing I've ever done. So if I'm running a marathon, I've got that reference point, I can look back and go, well, no one is forcing me to do this, I chose to do this, I can walk if I want. You know, I'm not super fatigued, I know that this is going to end, I know that this is going to be over in a couple of hours. Yes, my body is probably going to be sore and broken for a few days to a week afterwards, but I'm going to recover, I'm going to bounce back from that and you know, just having that reference point of being through that adversity previously sets you up for being able to use that moving forward and this is literally conditioning yourself now if I wanted to actually perform well in a marathon and I wanted to run a good time and I set my sights on achieving a specific time or a goal then Yes, I need to train for that. Okay, and this is where um specific training comes into play.

Now, I've got a good general base of training, all right, so I'm strong, I'm fast, I'm fit, my cardio is good, I'm explosive, you know, all of these attributes which I'll go through a little bit further down the line in this podcast? Okay, so I've got a good foundation. So what I would need to do is then just start building my endurance. I need to get some kilometres in the legs, I'd need to make sure that I could keep a certain tempo, um run to a cadence etcetera etcetera. Now if I was to run a marathon and set myself a goal then you know, I'd probably give myself a 3 to 6 month lead in time where I'm focused on that and I'm monitoring my load and I'm monitoring my my run times and I'm doing some tempo runs and I'm doing some longer endurance based runs and you know, just kind of building that mental fitness and that physical fitness and um you know, progressively overloading over time and throwing in some d loads and all that type of stuff and we'll speak about this in a little bit more detail later on down the line in this episode.

But you know, that's having a plan and then it's about putting steps in place over periods of time to allow you to achieve that goal. And that's what fitness is, okay. It's not exposing yourself to everything at once. It is using progressive overload and conditioning yourself and progressively making things more difficult and progressively making things more hard as your body starts recovering and adapting to those things and I'll speak about that very soon. Now, what does fitness entail? Again, going back to tying into making it relative to your life, Okay, uh if you want to achieve certain things then you're going to need to train for those certain things. Okay, this is called specific adaptation to impose demands. This literally means that your body is going to adapt to whatever you're doing. Okay. If you're not training for something specific then you may just be exercising okay to improve your mental fitness and your physical fitness.

Now, here's the difference, Training is a long term goal. That means what am I doing today that is contributing to this overall longer term goal. Okay, exercising on the other hand, is what am I doing right now, that's going to give me some benefits for right now. Okay, that's the difference. So there's a time to exercise and there's a time to train for the most part in my life I have been training and I've been training to be a better rugby player. I grew up playing rugby and then obviously I went into the military, so then my training changed to cater to that and I was training to be better at my job ah and then when I wasn't on deployment or training for deployment again, I was training for rugby now for the most part I am training okay, I'm looking at an overarching goal, how can I get myself to move better? I'm throwing in some mobility, I'm throwing in some flexibility. I'm throwing in recovery. I'm throwing in strength. I'm throwing in speed, I'm throwing in power hypertrophy, corrective exercise, endurance based work, energy, system conditioning, et cetera, et cetera.

Okay. For the most part, everything I'm doing has a reason. Um on the other hand, I'm going to exercise at times earlier this year, went away for six weeks and I went to Japan with a couple of mates and went snowboarding and then went to bali and uh did some scuba diving and then I went back to Australia, saw my family road tripped up to Byron Bay from Sydney and did my yoga course. So I was on my yoga course for two weeks and then road trip back down and I was I was away for six weeks. So, you know, I was exercising then and that's the difference, there wasn't anything specific that I was training for, I was just moving because I've created that association with movement, making me feel good. And then once I got back to Thailand, about 10 days later, the good old covid lockdown happened. So, you know, I had nothing specific to train for, I didn't know how long we're going to be in Lockdown Four, So that was a time when I was just exercising and what I was doing with that to break up my day was I was literally just doing like 20 minute sessions And I might have done some mobility in the in the morning and this was typically stuff that I might neglect when I'm at the gym.

OK, so I might do 20 minutes of mobility based work, I'll be practicing my yoga that I learned on my previous course. Uh and then later on in the day I might do some skill or technique work or some stability and strength work and then I might do some conditioning later on in the afternoon. I'll be working in those 3 20 min Blocks. All right, so then I was exercising, Yes, I was practicing movement as a skill but I had no um overarching goal that I was working towards. I was just moving to feel good and I was practicing movement to practice the skill, okay, and that was exercising. Now there's gonna be times in your life when you should be exercising. All right, But there should also be times in your life when you're training. One of my favorite sayings is that your training should either complement your life or it should counteract your life. And what I mean by that is if training is complimenting your life, that means that you're a fighter or you're playing some form of sports outside of work um might be amateur, might be professional, obviously if you're a professional, then your training should be complimenting your life, okay, Because that's necessary to be bigger, stronger, faster to compete better.

Um but if you're like a social amateur sports player, then obviously going to the gym and doing some movements and exercises that are going to contribute to being a better team player is going to be beneficial. Okay, There's also going to be times when you should be training to counteract your lifestyle. And an example of this is if you work in an office and you sit at a desk for 8 to 10 hours a day, okay, we are adaptation machines. Our body is going to adapt to whatever we do. So if you're spending a lot of time sitting throughout the day, your body will start replicating those positions, will start adapting and molding into those positions and those hip flexes are going to become short and tight, your shoulders, your pecs and delts are going to start rolling forward, those muscles are going to become short and tight. So if you're going to the gym, we need to look at counteracting those movements. Um Now, the reason we get into the reason our body adapts to those positions because we spent a lot of time there and our body is constantly trying to conserve energy.

So um if you're holding those positions for long periods throughout the day, the body is going to be like, let's just create this position so that we don't have to expend energy to get into that position. We're already spending a lot of time there. So let's just hold that position for the most part, All right, So when we go to the gym, this is where we want to counteract that this is where we want to work through the hip extensive as being the hamstrings and the glutes primarily. Okay, also that's through the lower body and then through the upper body, we want to work through um the postural muscles of the upper and middle back so that we can pull the shoulders back into a good position and back into good alignment. Now, here's the thing, this is why it's important to understand why you're doing something and this is why for the most part I like to train is because training has a specific purpose and if certain muscles are overactive and your body starts adapting to certain positions, then that's going to affect your joints alignments. If muscles of the front of the hips are overactive and short and tight and pulling um your joint out of alignment, guess what, that's going to translate into, you know, maybe some form of hip pain or maybe some form of knee pain or maybe some form of back pain.

Okay, um and this is gonna be the same thing for the shoulders. I work with a lot of fighters, right? So these guys spend a lot of time, you know, in this hunched over position where they're throwing punches and they're kind of protecting their chin and um keeping the chin tucks. So when they're spending a lot of time in that position, their body starts adapting to that position. Now this becomes a problem when we start going into overhead movements, pushing movements, pulling movements because their bodies adapted to these positions and they've created these habituated movement patterns or motor unit recruitment patterns meaning certain muscles firing at a certain time in a certain order. Instead of doing pulling movements where the back muscles should be working, they've created this movement where even though they're pulling the muscles of the front of the body in the front of the shoulders and the traps up around the neck are doing the work all right. And this creates issues and this creates like tension headaches and um things like that and there's a flow on effect. If there's some imbalances in the muscles anywhere in the body then this is going to have an impact, is going to have a flow on effect down the chain above and below that joint.

Let me give an example of this. I quite often ask people to train barefoot when they're training with me and I train barefoot a lot. If anyone follows me on social media or see me barefoot quite a quite a bit, especially when I'm doing strength and stability based work. Obviously if I'm doing speed and power based work and I'm jumping around and being super explosive then you know, I'm probably gonna protect my feet a lot more. But for the most part the warm up drills and the skills and drills and stuff that I'm doing is going to be barefoot and this is because there's so many um feedback receptors in the bottom of our feet. Now this is part of appropriate reception, appropriate reception is one of our feedback systems. It tells our brain where we are, where our body is in time and space. All right. And if we're wearing shoes all the time, it's like wearing a cast on your feet, if anyone's ever broken their arm, you wear a cast for six weeks, okay? You take that fucking cast off your muscles gone. This is a trophy. Okay. Your muscles waste away. Not only do your muscles waste away, but your brain also disconnect to those muscles.

Okay, because they're not being used, this is the use it or lose it principle. Now consider this every time you wear shoes, you're literally switching those stabilizers and their small intricate muscles of the feet off. And you're turning off those feedback receptors that are telling your brain where your feet are what muscles should be firing. Okay? So if your feet a week and they're not firing cause you wear shoes all the time, then that's going to have a flow on effect up the chain. Okay? You take your shoes off now your arch collapses, okay? That internally rotates um you're everything All those bones up through the leg. All right? And this is where you'll see the knee cave in. Um And this is where people will be running and they will have this like grinding sensation of the knee. And um then they'll have some issues in the hips and then they'll have some issues in the back and that might carry over to the opposite shoulder, up into the neck. Um So there's this massive flow on effect throughout the chain and that's what I mean by training to either complement your lifestyle or counteract your lifestyle.

Now this is fairly um fairly deep. There's a lot of there's a lot of moving parts here. It's very complex. So if you are interested in finding out more about this, shoot me a message on instagram at coach underscore codes ko bes uh D. M Me and I will shoot you through my online coaching details. I did go off on a massive rant there because you know, I kind of got in the groove and gotten the flow and that took me down that rabbit hole. So to get a little bit more of an understanding of exactly what I'm talking about with motor unit recruitment patterns and how we can address this with up across syndrome which is shoulders rolled forward, chin jutting out, head jutting forward and lower cross syndrome. Which is where we have this anterior pelvic tilt, hip flexes, short and tight. You've got back pain, um weak abs weak core, weak glutes etcetera. Then go on to my Youtube channel performance functional training and type in lower cross syndrome and up across syndrome, you've got some skills and drills there to go through some um soft tissue work to essentially lengthen those tight muscles, then some band of distractions which are laid to pull the joint back into better alignment.

And then you've got some activation drills. So you essentially strengthening the opposing muscles to hold that joint in correct alignment, which then which is then going to allow all of the surrounding muscles to stabilize and produce force and do their job whenever you go into any big compound based movements. Now, I just want to give some context for those listening. If people don't know who I am, I am a strength and conditioning coach, that is my background. So I obviously look at training through the lens of a strength and conditioning coach and some of the aspects that I'm looking at our strength, stability, speed, power, endurance, energy system, conditioning, hypertrophy, mobility, balance, coordination, timing, accuracy, rehabilitation, corrective exercise, flexibility and skill and technique work now for the average person. That's a fucking lot of stuff to take in. Okay, But my job as a strength and conditioning coach is look at every one of these aspects and give my client what they need.

My coaching philosophy is, if I'm not looking at the other 23 hours of the day, then I'm not doing my job as a coach. I need to optimize the other 23 hours of the day, through sleep, stress management, recovery, rehabilitation, um nutrition, hydration, hormone regulation, gut health, et cetera. I'm looking at all of this stuff outside that one hour training session so that when we do go into that one hour training session, I can get the most out of that. Okay. Um Then my training philosophy is give people a lot of what they need and a little bit of what they want, because people think that they need to hammer themselves to get in good shape. Okay, But here's the thing, if you move like shit, because you've been sitting at a fucking desk all day and then you go into the gym and you're doing all of these movements where you're doing push ups and box jumps, where you're just reinforcing these patterns and rolling the shoulders forward and getting the hip flexes, firing. Guess what? They're just reinforcing these poor patterns and you've already got a dysfunction.

You've got an imbalance, muscular imbalance, which pulls the joint into poor alignment and now they're just going and reinforcing that and loading that dysfunction. Alright, so that's my job as a coach. My job as a coach is to get people to move well without pain okay? And I need to look at all of those attributes and find a system that is going to work for every single individual client. Alright, Fitness is not just about fucking smash himself into the ground. Okay? Yes, that is a part of it, but you need to be moving well first and this is my job as a coach, is to get people moving well pain free so that I can improve their speed. Power strength bubble, bobble about all of that other stuff. So obviously that was very dense. My recommendation is to employ a good coach and work with them for at least three months. Okay, Get them to go through an individualist specific programme for you. Okay, so a good coach is always going to do a movement screen.

They're going to have a look at how you're moving, they're going to have a look at any dysfunction, They're going to have a look at any muscular imbalances. They're going to be asking questions about injuries. They're gonna be asking questions about food intake, nutrient deficiencies, gut health, sleep, quality, sleep duration. Um all this type of stuff comes into play and a good coach is going to be asking questions around that stuff so they can put together a solid training program and nutrition protocols as well as lifestyle change. Now I understand that not everyone can afford a personal trainer or a good quality coach. So this is where the group fitness classes come into play. Now I do coach group fitness classes and I have participated in them. However, I'm not a massive fan, is it better than nothing. Absolutely, okay, but those group fitness classes are not catered towards you as an individual, Okay, they're very general, right? So for the most part, if you walk into a group class, You know, it's not they're not thinking about the coach is typically not thinking about you as an individual.

They're not considering the individual variations and um individual injuries and surgeries and exercise history and all that type of stuff. And it's just 10 exercises on the board. 10 sets of each, sorry, 10 reps of each, 10 rounds through 30 minutes. Start the stopwatch, let's get after it. Okay. That's exercising and that's better than nothing. But it's not the most effective way of building your fitness. Now I see this happen time and time and time again where people, I'm sure there's people listening right now, they're like, oh, well, I go to F 45 I got the best results I've ever seen, blah blah blah. Well, that probably will happen for six weeks. And then your body adapted to that and then you had nowhere to fucking go. Your body probably hasn't changed for a long period of time. All right. And this is where period Ization comes into play. If you do the same thing over and over and over again, guess what? We adapt to that. We get very good at that. And now we're no longer expanding the same amount of energy to get that thing done because we've become efficient. Now I read an article. So I I did some research on this on a study that was conducted a number of years ago.

Now, don't quote me on this because I don't have this research up in front of me right now. But essentially it went something along the lines of this is that people were running like let's say five kilometers and they were burning save 500 calories. Okay. Now, after a couple of weeks of doing this, they were measuring, I'm not sure how they were measuring this, but they, We're still running five km, but instead of burning 500 calories now they're only burning 450 calories and then this continued on for another couple of weeks And then there are only burning 400 calories and then 350 calories, the body became efficient at utilizing that energy to cover the same distance. And we literally evolved to do this now, this is something that I think about all the time and I think it's hilarious that we go to the gym, we work all day and then we go to the gym, we lift weights, we train um you know, you go back 100 years ago and life was so much different. We had much more laborious lives, much more laborious jobs, so people weren't fucking sitting down all day and then having to go to the gym to burn off energy and let me tell you if you're going to the gym to burn off energy, then that's not a fucking smart way of doing things okay, You should be looking at, if you're looking at fat loss, you're looking at weight loss, you should be looking at the other 23 hours of the day.

And again that one hour of the day should be used to either complement or counteract your lifestyle. Let me circle back to period ization for a moment. What is period Ization? Period? Ization is simply a plan and it's working for a specific adaptation for certain period of time. Okay. And then progressing to the next adaptation or the next stimulus that you're trying to create. Let me give you an example of this. I've worked with numerous rugby teams and let's say in the offseason, the boys play the grand final, they have a couple of weeks off and then they roll back into training. Okay. For the first, say six weeks, we are focusing on hypertrophy based work, which is muscle growth. Let's put some muscle on, let's do some corrective exercise. You know, we're not lifting super heavy, We're creating mind muscle connection, we're eating a little bit more food so that we can create this um, anabolic growth response so that we can be a little bit bigger so that we can take more or go into contact and be able to handle.

Um these forces a lot better. I might follow that for six weeks. Okay. That means that I'm following, choosing certain exercise, I'm having them in certain orders. And then I'm having specific sets and reps and rest periods and time under tension etcetera, etcetera, then I'm going to transition into a strength phase. So all of that extra muscle that I've built is now going to be put to use to be able to produce more force. Alright, so again, that's going to determine the intent of strength is going to determine the variables which is going to be my exercise selection, exercise order sets, reps, wait, um rest periods time under tension, range of movement, planes of movement, directions that are moving etcetera etcetera. Once I've built that strength, then I'm going to go into a power phase and again, the intent is going to determine the variables. Okay, I've built some muscle, I've put on some size now I've built some strength, I can apply larger amounts of force. Now the power is about applying that force rapidly.

Alright, I might follow that for six weeks and then I'm going to go into some speed based work. So now I'm being a lot more explosive and being fast and I'm working on turnover rate of the legs and um footwork and that balance balance, coordination, timing, accuracy, um etcetera, so that I can use my skills a lot more effectively, right, and that's going to lead into conditioning And we might follow that program for 4-6 months leading into a rugby season. Once I get in season then it's looking at all of those attributes and going all right, what do I need to maintain throughout the season? So the pre season, it's all about building those attributes. Again, one attribute or one phase is going to lead into the next phase and then that is going to lead into the next phase. So as I build the strength, I'm doing a little bit of hypertrophy work so that I can maintain muscle, then when I go from strength to power, I'm doing a little bit of strength work so that I can maintain strength and muscle.

All right, But the focus is power and then when I go into speed, it's all about maintaining power, strength and hypertrophy whilst I build speed. So everything is layering one on top of the other. All right, now, this is where a lot of people go wrong as they go into a group fitness class and they're looking at all of these attributes and trying to do everything at once. And I've literally had people come up to me that uh you know, asking me to train them for a power lifting competition and the bodybuilding competition at the same time, and I'm like, you know, they're two completely fucking different things. One we're going to be looking at a higher body fat percentage, We're going to be producing a lot more force. It's gonna be a lot more compound based movements. Um you're gonna be walking around heavier, et cetera and the other, we're going to be restricting, that's going to affect our performance, your body composition going to come down, you're gonna be lena, you're going to be, you know, fatigues, you're gonna be restricting. And, and look, here's the thing, it's super difficult as a coach to sell this stuff because if you get someone come up to you and they're like, hey, I want to build some muscle and I want to burn some fat and I want to improve my fitness and I want to do this and I want to do that and blah, blah, blah, blah.

It's your job as a coach. If you're a coach listening, it's your fucking job to ask what is the most important thing right now, Okay? And if that person turns around and says, I want to lose body fat. Okay, you need to be asking questions like, how much food are you eating right now, how long you've been dying for? How did that diet work for you? All right. Because how that person is presenting to you is going to determine the direction that you need to go. Now? If you're not a coach and you're just an average person that wants to improve your fitness, Let me ask you something, What is your number one focus, what do you want to work on then you need to start making that a priority. Okay, You can't work on everything at once. You need to understand what you want to work on the man that chases two rabbits catches. Neither. So if you're trying to build strength and trying to build endurance at the same time, it's going to be very difficult. Can it be done? Yes. But you need to have a good coach to guide you through that process.

Okay? But if you're trying to do this on your own and you're literally throwing everything um and the kitchen sink into your training program or exercise plan, then you know, you're going to get some results for maybe two months and then you're going to just start spinning your wheels. There's a point of diminishing returns and once you hit that point you need to do more and more and more and you're getting you're going to get less and less and less result. Think about drinking coffee. Okay I'm at like four cups of coffee a day at the moment to get the benefits of cognitive function um from that coffee. So next week I'm actually going to come off caffeine because I'm relying on that caffeine to give me that cognitive up regulation. Now I need to come off caffeine for a couple of weeks so that I can get those same um those same functions with only one cup of coffee, it's the same thing with exercise, there's a point of diminishing returns. So once you start hitting a plateau, you need to change your phase, you need to go into a different phase, you need to go from um You know maybe muscle building into fat loss or fat loss into muscle building or into a strength phase or into a power phase or into stability and corrective exercise and rehabilitation and blah, blah, blah, blah.

All right, here's the thing. Fitness is a jigsaw puzzle, and fitness encompasses all of those things. So, um employing a good coach to guide you through that journey over a short period of time to teach you the lessons that you need to know right now to allow you to move in the right direction is super important. And I spoke about this in the time management, um episode about being efficient and effective with your time. Okay, you could be, you know, spinning your wheels for a year or two and going nowhere and wondering why the fuck, you're not getting any results or you could employ a good coach who's going to lead you down that path and is going to give you the things that you need to focus on that are actually going to get you the results that you want. Now, as I start winding up this episode and closing it out, I want to, I want to say that, you know, fitness for every single person is going to be different. So it's going to have a different value if you have no overarching goals and you, there's not something that you want to achieve performance wires or body composition wise, You don't want to put on any muscle or and, you know, lose any fat or um you know, work towards anything performance based, um then fitness is movement.

Okay, just do some movement, do something that is going to be fun, do something that is that you're going to enjoy Now, the reason I've kind of banged on about quality of movement patterns for pretty much most of this episode, is that what you do now consistently is going to affect you in 2030, 40 years time, right? So that's why I've been banging on about employing a good coach and creating good movement patterns, because Movement becomes a habit, like a brain literally creates a blueprint for movement and goes, right, you want to do this? I'm going to fire this pattern that I've already created, right? So that to me is why it's so important is because what you're doing now is going to affect you in 20 to 30 years time. All right. Um and likewise, you know, everything that you've done previously leading up to this point right now has led to, you know, that nagging knee injury or that nagging elbow injury or um that nagging shoulder injury or whatever it is, right? So addressing those things so that you can start moving better um and improve your movement quality and start decreasing any chronic inflammation of the joints, etcetera is going to be important.

Now, again, everyone's gonna have different values here. So, if your values are I'm moving and I'm playing to be with my kids and build those relationships and um you know, getting that social gathering or that social environment with playing social sports with my friends and going to training and things like that, like that's fucking awesome. That is super important as well. So the hierarchy of value episode goes into what your values are, um the goal setting episode, if you want to um work towards something, make sure you go and listen to that, there's obviously the effect of your environment as well. Um all of these things come into play and I've released these episodes in this order for a specific reason, so if there is something specific that you're working towards, I recommend going back to the start and listening through those episodes. Um but again, you know, you're going to have different values with fitness and I've actually started doing this a lot more in the last couple of weeks where um I'll just take a soccer ball to the gym, or I'll take my rugby ball to the gym or a tennis ball or um anything that is kind of going to allow me to play and I'm just I'm not having a structured training program, I'm just fucking around, okay, I'm kicking the footy with both feet, I'm passing left and right handed, I'm reacting to how the balls bouncing and um I'm just playing around with that because we evolved to move, okay, we we evolved to do things?

I'm playing to enjoy movement because it feels good? Okay, I'm not hammering myself, I'm just kind of playing around with movement and this is this is super important if if you know this type of fitness, if group group classes don't do it for you or personal training sessions don't do it for you, you know, find a different form of fitness, particularly if you spend a lot of time sitting throughout the day and you're very sedentary, very, very important for physical and mental health to get some form of movement in. Okay, and if that means that you're going to go and join a crossfit box because got that community environment, then all good. Get after it. Okay, but understand that if you do have poor movement patterns and then you go and load those movement patterns over as fast as you can through these big compound movements, you're likely going to cause some issues later on down the track. So improving movement quality is particularly important. Okay, but some movement is better than no movement.

So finding that environment that's going to allow you to get some some form of movement in that you enjoy that you can do consistently is the important thing here and that is what I want to end the episode on movements should be fun. Movement should be play. Movement should be enjoyable. You should not be looking at movement as a chore. Okay, this is a test of what can I do? How can I move? How can I, how is my body reacting? How's my body responding? Can I control my body? Can my body do these things that I'm asking it to do? Okay? Any form of movement that you're going to do consistently that you enjoy doing is a good form of movement. The western world is in the middle of a mental health crisis and our veterans have taken action. Swiss. Its team of combat veterans have built a proactive mental health program that is delivered through a mobile app. The app offers users programs in eight categories of health and lifestyle, all proven to reduce anxiety and depression. This holistic model forms your daily routine, aiding you to build structure, improve discipline and take ownership of your life.

Once these habits are formed, the app will teach you new skills, skills that can form identity purpose and encourage physical interaction to rebuild your tribe and reduce isolation.