60: Exercise, Mental Stamina, and High Performance

Brad Stolberg on the show. Brad researches, writes, and speaks about health and the science of human performance. He's a columnist with Outside Magazine and New York Magazine, and he's also written for The Los Angeles Times, Runners World, Forbes, NPR, and the Harvard Public Health Review. Thanks for chatting with me today, Brad. Hey, Scott, great to be here. See you write about a lot of relating to mastery and performance, high performance and sort of how to get the best

Reacher goals. So you're right about all stuff. So let's start with one of your most recent articles on how exercise can shape you far beyond the benefits of just the physical right. Yeah, exactly, So if you could talk a bit about that what is the latest research show about the benefits of exercise. Yeah, totally. So it's a topic that really intrigues me, and I approach this I

guess empirically first, because it's something that I've lived. So I noticed that when I started really pushing myself hard and training in endurance sports. In addition to all of the kind of traditionally spoken about physiological benefits of exercise, so weight management, blood sugar. Hopefully it will help me avoid osteoporosis in the future, I noticed that everything else in my life that otherwise might have stressed me out

or put me in a rudder caused great challenge. Everything just kind of became easier when I was training really hard physically. I mean, I'd say I probably first had this realization. I jotted it down in a journal. Maybe, I don't know. Five six years ago, I was working at a consulting firm where my days were pretty stressful, and I started getting really into endurance sports, and things just got easier, even though nothing substantially changed about the

work itself. So it's something I've lived for the past decade now, and or I guess half a decade maybe, but at least the past five to ten years and started researching it now in a writing capacity, and turns out there's I wouldn't say like a huge body of evidence, but yeah, there's some evidence that does show that pushing yourself physically can kind of translate into other pursuits and not just improve your physical fitness, but at the risk

of sounding cliche, it also kind of improves your life fitness. Are there certain kinds of exercise that are better than others? No? You know that was the interesting thing. I mean again, the studies generally just look at aerobic exercise, so they look at individuals that went from hardly running at all to taking up running. And I think in one study they also could have used other machines so like stare climber's,

elliptical trainers and such. But I think the real benefit is coming from your choosing to do something that is hard and uncomfortable. And like I say in the article, you're practicing being comfortable in an uncomfortable situation. Right, Yeah, you do talk about that a lot, So it is uncomfortable pushing yourself to the physical extremes. And you also have described it as like practicing suffering, So is that something is that like a muscle suffering, like a muscle

you can practice, you know, I don't know. It's actually I went back and forth with my editor on whether or not to use the word suffering, and we did because I tend to not love to use that word, because there's also the kind of suffering of a terrible health diagnosis and spiritual suffering and all that comes with it. So this is purely the notion of your body telling you this really really hurts your mind, telling you this

is really hard. I want to stop in you making the choice to continue to push yourself and continue to endure that pain in discomfort. So that's what I mean by suffering, and you know my experience, and again some emerging evidence cites that, Yeah, it probably is a muscle that can be trained, or at least your capacity to endorse suffering. So you trained for marathons, is that right? Yeah? I dabbled in traathlons and do currently I am running marathons? Yes? Yeah?

Is that? Like you know, do you think like how does talent play a role in there? Like could anyone learn how to run a marathon? Yeah? Absolutely, you know I'm gonna I'm gonave it me. Oh, totally. Scott really going to quote a good a good friend and mentor. His name is Mike Joyner. He's over at the Mayo Clinic and has a great lab on human performance, and he and I have literally, I'm not exaggerating, spent hours

talking about nature versus nurture. And what Mike says is that it's very, very hard to be world class at anything, but most people can become pretty good at most things. And I think marathon running falls into that category. So you don't have to be world class to finish a marathon, correct. I really think that with the right attitude and training plan, anyone can run a marathon. So if I aim for if my goal is to get last place in a marathon, like,

how hard work is that to like go through? Like what do I have to do to be able to at least just complete it? Well, I mean you have to run, I mean, can I Is there a time limit? No? So, oh you're talking about like the actual like logistics of marathons. Yeah, So most marathons have cutoffs, but they're quite slow. I mean I don't know off the top of my head what they are, but you could probably find a marathon where you could walk the whole thing. That's what I'm wondering.

Can you walk it and coming under a time limit? You probably could, But I mean, if you walk twenty six miles before, oh, I've not even walked a mile before, that's not true. I'm sure you have no I I'm joking, but twenty six miles, Like it's tough to walk twenty

six miles. But yeah, I mean, marathons have have quite generous time cutoffs, and you know, it's something that I always come back to, Not to get too far off on a tangent with sports, is that even though I cover elite athletes and I'm kind of roped up into that circle, I myself and so far from an elite athlete, and I think being around them and covering them and getting to know them, it's making me realize just how

slow I am. But that doesn't mean that you can't reap all the benefits of pushing yourself physically and exercise and setting goals. I guess what I'm getting is I really try to avoid it. It's fun to joke about, but an elitist attitude, like I think that the five and a half or six hour marathon finisher it has just as much to be proud of as the two and a half hour finisher. Wow, So you can run twenty six miles in one go, Yeah, I can. A lot of people can well. So what's your What are

your cholesterol levels? You know? I don't know them off the top of my head. I haven't gotten I haven't gotten my blood work done in quite a while. I've got kind of an old school physician that is of the mindset that if you're not symptomatic, there's no real need to do blood work. Sounds like you're drinking a protein shake over there, water Battle. I'm imagining you like dosing up on your protein and your creatie. So you've also heard about how big goals could backfire. So what

have you learned from Olympian athletes about goals? Goal setting? Yeah? I guess in a nutshell, goal setting is really important, and it's really important to have goals, and they should act as a north star and something to shoot for. But focusing too much on any one goal can be detrimental to performance and fulfillment and health and well being. It can really set you up for failure. The reason that I ended up covering this topic was at the Olympic Trials, which is the event to see who makes

the Olympic team. A runner named Brenda Martinez who runs the eight hundred, which is two laps around the track, a very quick race. She was in prime position to qualify for the Olympic team. And Brenda's twenty eight years old. I mean, this is something that she's been working towards since she was probably ten. And the runner behind her lost her footing fell forward into Brenda, causing Brenda to trip and fall. Whoops, right, a big whoops, and that

was it. I mean she got passed by I think like five or six gals and in a race that short, there's no way you're going to catch up. And I mean there's twelve years of training in Olympic dreams and her goal to make the Olympics in her marquee race. Why key and m Brenda is she was also registered to run the fifteen hundred, which is a race that is still pretty quick. I mean, you can do the math, it's pretty easy, almost twice as long, but it's not her marquee event. She's not nearly as good at it.

And she told me that if she wouldn't have had the incident in the eight hundred, she wouldn't have even participated in the fifteen hundred. So you can imagine right after getting tripped up and kind of missing out on your dream, you could be pretty down to straw and devastated. And she just got right back on her grind, went on to win three races in six days and ended up qualifying in the fifteen hundred to go to the Olympics,

and ended up going to the Olympics. Nice. So I interviewed her for Outside magazine just about how she did it, and she kept on coming back to this notion of focusing on the process and kind of letting go of her goal, which was to make the Olympics in that marquee event of hers, the eight hundred, and just going back to, well, what do I have to do to run my best over the next week? In approaching each action as its own thing, and that's what got her

through the week. And I just thought there was such a powerful message in that that applies well beyond sports. Yeah, and you also come with a bunch of lessons for what's the problem with goals in the first place, as opposed to the process, And you actually list a bunch of things. Could you talk about some of them? Yeah? You know again, I don't want to say that you shouldn't set goals. I think setting goals are important. I think this happens when you become too attached to some

kind of end. Result is that well, first off, you can relinquish your sense of self worth to things that are outside of your control. So you might really really want to get promoted, and you might be doing everything right, but then your boss has a medical incident and has to take leave or retire. You might have done everything perfectly to train for your iron Man triathlon, but it storms that day, or you get a tire on the bike. You might write what you think is the perfect novel

and the publishing house disagrees. Now, do these things make you a failure? Well, I mean it guess depends on how you look at it. Right, If you're only attached to whether or not you accomplish the goal, then they do. But if you are attached to more of the process and did you get better in the process of actually doing the work itself, then it's a whole different psychological framework that you're operating from. Right, Or if you tie

it to your self worth right, exactly. Yeah, that seems quite right, and you do see a lot of people. It sounds like a positive psychology distinction between harmonious and obsessive passion that people fit a positivechology study. Have you ever linked it to that distinction? Yeah, so, actually I think I mentioned that a little bit later on the article, so I have I know, I set you up. Yeah for that question, I think always and yeah, it's very similar.

There is an interesting study looking at elite athletes. The researchers look at you know, they qualify them as either showing more harmonious passion or more obsessive passion, and those in the obsessive passion bucket end up being much more likely to cheat, which I thought it was interesting and it makes sense. And again, like I haven't seen studies, but I'd have to imagine that the same thing is

true outside of sports. So like in the corporate world, my guess is, if people are just focused on results, they're probably the ones that are more likely to cross the slippery slope into unethical behavior. Yeah, no, I would expect that too. Well, that's a neat finding. I haven't seen that. I haven't seen that in the literature the cheating one. I've seen, you know, stress and burnout and things of that nature, but not cheating. So that's really interesting.

So in your other work that you've rt about, have you writ about the importance of something you call progressive overload or do you call it or does someone else call it that? Well, myself and someone else, So I did not come up with that term. It's an exercise science term. Okay, progress of overload? So how is that better than going to the gym? And you know, because I've been taught that I'm supposed to go to the gym and do like a different exercise to confuse my

muscles and excite my muscles to striving for novelty. But you're saying that that's not necessarily the best way to go. Progressive overload might be better. Yeah, I mean, I think it depends on what your goals are. So if your goals are just to get to the gym and to get your heart rate up into to sweat, then pretty much anything is better than doing nothing. So go do different classes and different exercises. I mean, obviously be safe about it, but yeah, just go to the gym and sweat.

But if you want to actually improve it a specific discipline, So it might be weightlifting. You might want to get better at a specific sport like running, rowing, a specific skill like squatting, you really have to kind of set up a plan to focus on mastering that particular capability. I guess i'd play it back to you, right, Scott, Like, if you approached your work instead of, you know, focusing

on psychology. One day you read about astronomy, and one day you read about physics, and another day you read about business and you had real, no real path. You know, do you think that that would really lead to progression in your intellect? Right? Not in a unified intellect, but right, I might see unexpected connections and that I wouldn't have seen before. I mean, it's possible, but yeah, no, I

get your point for sure. So yeah, so progressive overload again, you know, it's kind of a common theme in a lot of these stories I end up doing for New York Magazine. Is I see something in athletics, and then there's a fair amount of applicability elsewhere. So the notion of progressive overload is that to get better at something you have to be fairly specific. So if I want to make my bicep stronger. I have to do exercises that stress my bicep, and after I stress it, I

have to let it rest and recover. And if I apply too much stress, I'm going to hurt my arm. If I don't recover, I'm going to hurt my arm. But if I don't stress it enough, I'm not going to grow. Nothing's going to happen. So it's operating in this cycle of stress something, let it rest and recover. That's when growth occurs. Stress it a little bit more, let it rest and recover, more growth occurs, et cetera,

et cetera. And I thought that, you know, it's a really neat framework to look at, you know, again, well beyond the gym and well beyond sports progressing in other realms as well. No, yeah, that does make sense. So progressive overlord? Who else calls it that? You know? I don't know where the term initially came from. It's widely known amongst I mean, really just across the board in athletics,

so weightlifting, endurance sports. Pretty much any strength and conditioning coach you'd speak with would probably be familiar with the term right on, right on. So now I'll sound like I'm a sporty person, like, I know what I'm talking about. Yeah, sometimes it's called periodization as well. Oh wow, that sounds fancy too, Yeah, giving you two fancy terms to throw around. Good Yeah, athlete cocktail parties. Thank you boring, you know.

And that's the thing that I wrote in Peace It Right, because it is, like you said, it's a lot more fun to do something different and to kind of chase the latest and greatest exercise routine. And I think that

society really caters to that. If you were to read health and fitness magazines, and I'm somewhat complicit because I write for them, you'd think that it makes the most sense to change things up every month because every new magazine has this new plan that's the secret to fitness, when in fact you'd probably be better off, you know, staying on the same path. No, that makes sense and purpose. Is that also tied up with values? Yeah? I think so, And the research bears out that it's tied up with

core values. So again, this was just an interesting linkage between kind of my two worlds of sport and I guess what you might want to call like the academic or intellectual realm, So For the piece, I interviewed a strength and conditioning coach named Brett Bartholomew works with all the top NFL fo I shouldn't say all, but many of the top NFL football players, and he trains their bodies, but he also works with them on their mindset, and

he really preaches the importance of purpose and reflecting on your purpose and always asking why you're doing something and what am I trying to achieve and what are my values? I thought that was interesting because I know of some other literature out of public health that shows that if you have an individual reaffirm his or her core values, they're more likely to be successful in hard health behavior changes,

so things like quitting smoking or eating healthier. So it seems, and I don't know the mechanism, but it seems that there's something about reaffirming your core values again closely linked to purpose in being thoughtful and reflective and perhaps being able to stay the course when it's hard. Yeah. I like that link. That does seem to apply to a lot of things like grit for anything as well. Yeah,

keep you gritty? Yeah, I think so. I mean something that I learned in writing that story is really just the power of asking why, right, Like why am I doing something? And it seems so basic, But I think that, like and in my own life, if I were to do that more often, I'd probably be a lot happier and more productive, I think, So, I think, And it sounds like you do try to do it in your own life. Yeah, I try. It doesn't mean I'm successful. You wrote it, you wrote in an email to me.

Also good stuff because I try and struggle to practice what I preach. In a sense, it can be easier to write about these things and to hold yourself accountable to living them. So you you do give this a go. So, yeah, there's like a whole movement of like self experimentation. Like I've had some other guests in the show who are big into self experimentation, like aj Jacobs and Tim Ferriss. Yeah,

I've listened to some of this podcast right on. Yeah, I mean, I think you know, Scott, I think that, like it's a mix of two things, right, It's it's just downright fun to do some of the self experimentation, And then I think it livens up the writing, or at least it feels like to me, it makes it a little bit easier to write about this stuff if I'm also trying it out and seeing how it impacts me.

What I don't ever do and it annoys me when some people do, is you know, end of one experiments where I try something and because I have a result, therefore this science says that this works. So I guess that sometimes I maybe I operate in the opposite direction as I look to see where there's been a meta analysis or at least a study with the decent sample size, and then I go try that thing. Right, Well, that's great, I mean that's science personal experimentation exactly. Yeah, very interesting,

very interesting angle to a unique niche there that you have. Okay, so you've also talked about how stress is stress? Is that like sometimes the cigar is a cigar? Say more, I've never heard that. Freud said sometimes the cigar is just a cigar. Like sometimes we make a lot more, we project all sorts of things when we don't really see the things for what they are. I see, Yeah, I guess you could say it's similar in nature. Yes,

So you know when I say stress as stress. And this story was written for Outside magazine, it's about the notion that again coming I'll make a nice tie here coming back to progressive overload. Right. How to get better physiologically and athletically is you want to stress your body and then let it recover. And a lot of athletes, particular amateur athletes, professionals are very good about recovery, but

amateurs aren't great about recovery. So they'll go out and they'll do a really really hard workout and then they'll run out the door to work. They'll forget to eat breakfast, we'll get to work. They'll be in a super stressful situation, whether it's like a big high stakes meeting or cranking on a memo on deadline, and even though they're no longer running those six minute miles, their body is still

totally going for it. And what the research bears and what lots of the experts that are applying this have found, is that the body can't really differentiate very well between physical and psychological stress. So even though your workouts end and you should be recovering, your body is still in stress mode. Again, this is something that doesn't really affect

professional athletes. It's one of the separating factors I think between amateurs and professionals is profession most really know how to recover, whereas amateur athletes often just operate in kind of a continuous cycle of stress. Continuous cycle of stress. Wow, I made that up. But does it sound like something I want to be in, right? I don't want to be in that, say I want to get out of that cycle. Just yeah, that can really these things can

like perpetuate itself like dominoes. Yeah, I mean I think so when I say stress, I guess I should clarify I'm coming at it firstly in this instance, how I will be spoken about in exercise science. So stress is just simply something that is exerting a challenge on you. So stress doesn't necessarily need to be a fight with

your spouse or a fight with your boss. But it means that, I guess, in a workplace setting, your kind of your shoulders are up, you're cranking on a demo or a memo, you feel some sense of urgency, whereas rest and recovery. You know, the apex of that is sleep, but it's more of a relaxing state. Yeah. I thought something really interesting for that article was a quote by kiehe k I E l I. You said, you definitely want to trigger a stress response, it's the key to growth. Well,

that's really interesting. That's like similar to like the post traumatic growth literature and positive psychology that we we grow from our getting meaning from our trauma or triggering that response and then ordering how to overcome it makes us more resilient. But you say that that's only good. You know, activating the stress response is only good for growth if it's acute. What does that mean? Yeah, so love that quote as well. I'm glad that you pulled it out.

So acute means that it happens, there's a stress, and then it ends, and then you can shift into a more rastful state. So again, giving like a very a very extreme example in sports, it would be if you just constantly trained really really really hard and never stopped right, you'd get hurt or you'd burn out, like something bad would inevitably happened. So you need to keep this stress

it's rather acute. If you train really really hard for two hours and then have that protein shake and relax and allow your body to calm down, then that stress can precipitate growth. Is it good to drink protein right after your workout? Ah? Man, I should just sign you up for some personal training. I mean it depends, right, do you want to be my personal trainer? I'd love to. Where do you live? I live in Oakland, California, so

it'd be tough, but we could do it over skype. Interesting. Interesting? Maybe you can be my life coach? No you think you could be mine? Yeah? Sorry, go on? No? Where were we? My memory stinks? So yeah? Stress and stress in oh acute. So yeah, I think that the research bears out in physiology. So again I can only speak to the research that I know is that you only grow from stress from physiological stress if it's followed with recovery.

I think some of the more interesting were in this field is there have been a couple of studies that show that in athletes that are still in school, like in collegiate athletes per se, that injuries go up during exam time, which kind of support I mean, again, it's correlation, but it supports the hypothesis that you know, if you exam times stressful cognitively, So if you go from practice really hard physical practice, but then you're nervous about exams

or you're studying really harder, you're staying up at night, your body doesn't ever really get a chance to recover and you're more susceptible to an injury. That's very interesting. Yeah, so it's a I think there's some practical applications there, right, So how can you optimize your recovery? Then? What are some practical takeaways there? So I think the most important thing one I shouldn't say the most one of the most important things I've learned in all my research and

reporting is just the importance of sleep for everything. This isn't just for optimizing your physical or recovery, also for optimizing your mental, your emotional just recovery. I've kind of come around to saying that sleep is one of the

most productive things that you can do period. You know, listeners, I hate to say it, but if you're listening to this and it's late at night and we're looking like at the difference between six and a half or seven hours of sleep, like go to sleep, and that'll be like the most value of this podcast can give you. Sleep is really important. Do you just take another sip of your protein shake? So sleep is important. Yeah, now

I've got I've got. If only we could do this on video you're making these, then people would actually like see me in what I look like. We'd be like, why is this guy talking about sports? What now you explore you to me when I just saw you. Yeah, maybe it's because I have a hat on the hat lies. Oh okay, okay to me, I mean, compared to me, you look very sporty, right, I mean that's what I was kind of saying a little while ago. Right, It's

it's all relative. And it's been super humbling being able to have these conversations with like the world's best performers. Because I don't want to say that I had an ego, but maybe three years ago, before I started doing this kind of reporting, I probably thought I was a better athlete than I was. Yeah, And it's very very humble, and it's, you know, I'm not a good athlete at all compared to them. So who am I to look at someone that is slower than me and say that

they're not good? I mean, I think and a lot of the pros will say the same thing. And that's that's one of without getting too esoteric here, I think that's the beauty of sport is that you know, you're really competing against yourself. I mean, what, yeah, what are your own personal goals. I mean, you're not trying to be an elite athlete, right, You're just trying to be healthy. Yeah, I'm trying to be healthy and get better. You know.

One of the reasons that I love running is because it's it's and I guess it's probably now that I think about it, one of the reasons that I gravitate towards writing. It's like a craft in the sense that it's just you and running, and it's a very honest, objective measure of whether you succeed or fail, right, Like, you either get faster, you can run a longer distance. And to me, there's something very gratifying about having that kind of objective feedback that I think kind of get

hooked me. Yeah. Yeah, everyone's quantifying or anything now, but that seems to be a good way to greach your goals. Yeah, and just kind of fulfillment, right, Like, Yeah, I got started in running, like I said, after school when I started working and I had a corporate job in consulting, and I think that we did a lot of good, and a lot of that good was very subjective in nature, right, So like in consulting, does the client actually do what

you say? Is it based on politics at the organization that you're consulting to, Like, there are so many things in between the work that you did in an outcome that it's very very hard to say like, oh I did a good job, whereas if I went in Iran, it's like I ran five miles today. That was a half a mile more than yesterday. Like I got better, And I think that's really gratifying to me. This does sound very pery satisfying. Is the anything else you wanted

to add to this interview today? No, I mean, I think that this has been a really really good conversation. I guess the kind of takeaway, right, And what I'd say that my beat is is that there's so much and I know that you are, you know, mister creative over there, so I'm preaching to the choir, But I think that we often get caught up in very siloed thinking and kind of stuck in our own narrow lane

in our domain. But there's so many commonalities across domains and slightly nuanced implementation of different concepts that you can pull from athletics and apply something into the business world. You can pull something from the business world and apply it into athletics, and I guess that's kind of my mission with writing, is to try to surface some of these things to make people think a little bit differently.

Good stuff, brad Well, thanks for the good writing you do and bring in all the science to make it accessible to people. Yeah, thanks so much, Scott. I really enjoyed the conversation. Thanks for listening to The Psychology Podcast with doctor Scott Barak Kauffman. I hope you found this episode just as thought for booking and interesting as I did. If you'd like to read the show notes for this episode or hear past episodes, you can visit the Psychology Podcast dot com.