Episode #967
Ever feel like your body just doesn’t bounce back like it used to?
You’re not alone—and it’s not just about getting older. In this episode, I’m joined once again by Dr. Phil Batterson, PhD in exercise physiology, to talk about something most guys overlook: recovery.
We dive into why your body might feel stiff, tired, or inflamed… even when you’re “doing all the right things.” The truth? Most men are overtraining and under-recovering. And that’s exactly why their results suck.
We break down how to build a fitness routine that actually fits your life, how stress is crushing your gains, and why things like sleep, breathwork, and protein matter way more than your fancy supplements or ice baths.
In this episode, you’ll learn what an effective weekly plan looks like for the average high-performing man, why three days a week might be all you need, and how to structure recovery to actually feel better, not worse.
This one’s for the guy who’s grinding in business, trying to be there for his family—and still wants to feel like an athlete without burning out.
You don’t need to do more. You just need to do it smarter.
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Want to connect with Dr. Phil Batterson?
📧 Email: batterson.phil@gmail.com
📱 Instagram: @drphilbatterson
🎙️ Podcast: Critical Oxygen – for those of you who like a deep dive into performance and physiology.
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Transcription
Doug Holt 0:00
Doug, you’re not 20 anymore. Like, you’re working out like… like, you don’t have to lift that much weight in deadlifts. You don’t. You don’t have to do all these things to your body. Like, science is showing us three days a week is probably… you can probably get away with four.
When I think about it, it was almost like that, “Oh, I forget that I’m 48.” It just… it doesn’t cross my mind ever, unless I have to talk about my age. And I think a lot of men are like that. We forget that we haven’t worked out for a while. We forget, or we choose not to recognize, that our body has changed.
Hey, guys, welcome back to another episode of the TPM Show. Once again, we are joined by our special guest, Phil Batterson. Phil has got a PhD in exercise physiology, as well as a whole long list of credentials. And guys, if you haven’t listened to the podcast I did with Phil earlier, where we talk about Phil torturing me, go back and listen to that as well, or at least add that to the queue. This one’s gonna be a standalone. Phil, thanks for being here.
Dr. Phil Batterson 1:06
Thanks for having me back, Doug.
Doug Holt 1:08
I’m glad you’re here, man. So I let our community know that you were gonna be here and just asked them, “Hey, what are some of the questions you guys have?” So I thought I’d read one of the questions and we can just riff off that.
Perfect. So this one’s from Todd. He said, “Doug, the one that interests me the most is the strength and conditioning coach,” which you have a background in. “I’m doing many things to move the needle in other areas of my life”—good job, Todd—”however, as I age, my body gets stiffer, and not the ways I enjoy. I’d love to learn daily and weekly habits that I can make a routine and ideally take half an hour of my day, if that’s even possible. What’s an optimal fitness routine for the average person?”
Dr. Phil Batterson 1:49
Yeah. So I’ll say this to start out: if you’re just getting into exercise, sometimes doing less is actually better. Because if you just jump in full bore—an hour a day, 30 minutes a day—your body may not be prepared to recover from what you’re putting it through. Even though you’re like, “Oh, well, back in college, I used to lift two times a day, and I was drinking, you know… like drinking three times a week,” and now maybe you’re just drinking three times a week and you’re doing zero exercise per day.
Do the least amount of work you can do to get the most amount of gains. That’s ultimately what it comes down to. You’re looking for minimum effective dose. And aches and pains, a little bit of soreness—that sort of stuff is normal when you first start exercising again. But if those aches or pains don’t go away after a day of rest or a couple days of rest, then chances are you probably did something that was a little bit too much for you. So I wanted to start with that.
Doug Holt 3:01
Sure. So when you talk about just starting—because I know what a lot of these guys are thinking, right? “No, no, I’m not just starting exercise. I used to work out all the time. Not college, but six months, a year ago, two years ago.” How does somebody know when they need to reset that clock?
Dr. Phil Batterson 3:19
If you can’t remember the last workout that you did—the day you did it and what you did for that workout—chances are you probably need a little bit of a reset. So, coming back—the good news is that you can do very little to start gaining fitness back, whether that’s strength, whether it’s cardiovascular fitness.
If you’re working on mobility—sounds like Todd had a little bit of joint stiffness and other things like that—the good news is that even working 30 minutes, three times a week, will start pushing you in the right direction. So, I would say it’s always okay to totally reduce to two or three times a week when you first start getting back to something. So if you’re six months out, just start there, and then you can always build up.
The bad thing is—and I see this with a lot of endurance athletes I’ve trained in the past—they get it in their head that, “Oh, to be a successful endurance athlete, I have to run every single day.” So they start that, they have really positive experiences with good improvement in performance and other things like that, and then two months down the road, three months down the road, everything falls apart.
Because they didn’t put structures in place for them to balance the stress of exercise with the extra recovery that you need. Because you have to remember that when you’re adding exercise to your life, you’re increasing the amount of stress you’re placing on your body. And yes, some people will say, “Oh well, you know, like exercise is a good stress”—your body doesn’t differentiate between, say, a good stress and a bad stress (and I’ll put those in quotes there). It just knows: how much stress am I dealing with, and how much stress can I get rid of on a daily basis through recuperative time, downtime, sleep.
And I know when you’re a businessman who is hard charging, wakes up super early in the morning, has kids, has a spouse, and a relationship that they’re also trying to foster… that stress bucket can almost be overflowing. So you need to be able to balance that first and foremost, and then you can build from there.
Doug Holt 5:35
You know, one of the things I think a lot of people miss, right, is that recovery period. So I’m not saying this will be Todd, but I’ve been guilty of this—of going, “Okay, Phil’s saying three times a week is good. Well, shoot, I’ll do five,” right? And then we miss the sleep because we have young kids. And then, you know, “Well, geez, I really need to lose 20 pounds, so I’m gonna go in a caloric deficit—and not just any caloric deficit, but I’m just gonna go carnivore diet.” We don’t need to talk about specific diets, but I’m gonna go on such a caloric restriction that my body’s not gonna be able to recover. I see this all the time with people—and I’ve done it myself. What would you say to the guys out there that are like, “Okay, I wanna get in shape, I’m motivated,” and they’re kind of the all-or-nothing personality type?
Dr. Phil Batterson 6:23
If you’re truly motivated and if you’re all-or-nothing, go all in on the workouts that are prescribed—the 30 minutes—and then go all in on the recovery. That is something that people… they’re like, “Just give me the workouts. I’m just gonna crush the workouts.” And then they just say, “Screw it. No recovery.”
If you’re truly all in, then you’re gonna do both of those tasks. You’re gonna go balls out in your workout, and you’re gonna go balls out in your recovery. So show me first that you can do that, and that you can improve each week just based off of two or three workouts a week. And then once you’ve kind of earned that check mark, then you can graduate to four days a week—maybe it’s Monday, Tuesday, rest day Wednesday, then Thursday, Friday.
And then if that goes really well, and that fits with your lifestyle, and you can recover from it—here’s the biggest thing: exercise should facilitate your ability to have good relationships, do better at life, do better at business, be more available for your kids. It should not hinder it. That is the number one thing. After you’ve gotten two, three weeks into your training program, if you’re exercising so hard—because maybe you have this relationship with exercise that’s like, “I just want to punish myself,”—and it’s hindering your ability to do all those other things I just described, then you’re probably doing too much.
Doug Holt 7:57
Yeah, I’ve been guilty of that.
Dr. Phil Batterson 8:00
You’re looking at one. I fall into this trap way too often. But use it as a calibration tool. And then having a coach as well to pull you back and pull the reins—because humans are awful at knowing what they can do and how long they can do it for. We’re really good at overestimating our capabilities.
Doug Holt 8:23
Or thinking we’re different.
Dr. Phil Batterson 8:25
Yeah, exactly.
Doug Holt 8:27
“I don’t need that.” So I was doing CrossFit five days a week—five in the morning, right? And I was getting up at four. At one time, for a while, I was getting up at 3:30 in the morning because I had other stuff to do, and getting it done and being optimal. And I would do that, so I’d miss my sleep. Nutrition? Okay, I was okay on that. But the other recovery methodologies, I just threw them out the door. Like, “Okay, something’s got to go. It’s the recovery stuff.”
So now I have a torn rotator cuff, arthritis—all these other things—which is a setback. Then guess what? I started gaining more weight again. Now I’m in this cycle of, “Okay, now I have to go balls to the wall to lose that weight so I can crush my VO2 max,” because I’m competitive. I don’t think I’m alone in this. I think there’s a lot of men out there that, once we decide, “Hey, I’m going to go for something,” we go all out. And what you’re saying is: cool, got you—but go all out on the recovery. What does that look like? What would a non-workout day recovery versus a workout day recovery look like?
Dr. Phil Batterson 9:33
So I always like to end a workout with five to ten minutes of walking—either on a treadmill or, if you can, get outside because the weather is nice—and just doing some box breathing. You know, so that inhale for four seconds, hold for four seconds, exhale for four seconds, hold at the bottom for four seconds. Because exercise is inherently a stressful activity. And the best people in the world—right, these professional athletes—they’re the best at actually transitioning from the hard work to the relaxation. And I think a lot of the time, especially with really hard-charging individuals, we’re always in this state of mild stress. And if my PhD taught me anything, it’s actually that continuous drip of stress signals in the body that are leading to very negative and deleterious outcomes.
Because exercise should be this massive spike in stress, and then you should immediately go back. It’s kind of like, if you were a primal man, you’d run from a tiger—or you’d run toward an antelope trying to kill it. You get the antelope—and then you rest. You wouldn’t have anything anymore. So that’s in my mind’s eye—that transition point is really important. And then also, if possible, having ways of transitioning out of that stressful situation toward the end of the day. Say you put the kids down, say you and your wife like to watch a show or something like that. First and foremost—don’t have a TV in the bedroom, because that is screen time, getting inundated with things that are kind of stressful.
So keep it out in the living room. Once you watch your show, get up and have some sort of box breathing routine, stretching routine, something like that. It doesn’t even have to take more than five to ten minutes, but it’s just a transitionary point where—hopefully by this time—you’re starting to wind down from all the emails, all the dings, all the buzzes of the world: social media, emails, the fires that need to be put out at work. But that’s what I mean by recovering hard. And then also, on top of that, I think another really good way is just having protein. Protein is the building block for the muscle you’re trying to build. When you are doing cardiovascular work, your protein is actually used to repair all of the little gears and mechanisms that are allowing you to use oxygen and propel yourself—on the treadmill, on the bike, those sorts of things.
And you need protein in order to do that. And if you’re not giving yourself adequate protein, you’re essentially stacking a Jenga tower higher and higher. And what happens to a Jenga tower if you don’t replace the blocks at the bottom? It falls over. So protein are those blocks. And the human body is amazing, because you can make a Jenga tower—but you can also replace the bottom blocks because you can resynthesize more.
Doug Holt
So does that make sense in terms of the recovery aspect of things?
Dr. Phil Batterson
Absolutely. So I know some of these guys out there, they’re gonna be like me. They’re gonna be like, “Okay, but where’s my ice bath, my sauna, my foam rolling fit in? Where are the gadgets?” The foam rolling—I use a foam roller every single day. Whether you want to argue about it scientifically or not, if it’s getting rid of adhesions—whatever—it’s a way of having a routine to get yourself disconnected from all the stress and all the busyness of life.
The ice bath is actually an insanely high acute stress. And I would say probably 99.9% of people do not need it. The people who do need it are the ones who are in the CrossFit Games and need to recover really fast between two workouts. If you do an ice bath far enough away from bedtime, you get this huge spike in stress. So if you’ve ever done an ice bath, it feels really good when you get out. It feels awful when you’re in it.
You’re trying to calm your breathing, do all this other stuff. But the reason why it feels good when you get out is because you just released a sh*tload of stress hormones. And if you’re already dealing with a sh*tload of stress hormones because your life is stressful, then doing something along those lines is just going to be more stressful. I don’t know if that’s normal. I don’t recommend it to people.
Doug Holt 14:23
Are you reducing inflammation? Are you—the whole idea that contrast showers are flushing blood in and out of muscle cells?
Dr. Phil Batterson 14:30
I think for, you know, if you’re working out three times a week, then you don’t need to worry—
Doug Holt 14:35
—about that. But I can buy an ice bath. I can’t buy a workout.
Dr. Phil Batterson 14:38
I know. And, you know, I would say it’s—again, the benefits may extend beyond physical benefits. So you may have—like, a lot of people I’ve talked to who are really preachy about ice baths (I’m not)—are like, “Well, it really helps me cope with stress better,” because you’re putting yourself in a really stressful situation. Cold water is stressful as shit.
Doug Holt 15:06
I have an ice bath. For me, you can’t focus on anything else. You’re not thinking about the emails at work or things like that. You’re in there—you’re almost in a meditative state. It’s like a forced meditative state, right? Which—you’re doing breath work at the same time.
Dr. Phil Batterson 15:26
So from that perspective, I think, you know, from the mental perspective, it could be beneficial. I just think that, like, if you don’t have one right now, use your bathtub. I use my bathtub, and the water gets cold enough that I can cope with it. But don’t think that that is going to be a cure-all, end-all-be-all for your exercise. It doesn’t replace exercise.
Doug Holt 15:55
Hey guys, I just want to share something with you. I’m sure we can both agree that in order to fix something, you need to know what’s broken. And not only do you need to know what’s broken, but a step-by-step methodology on how you can fix it. That’s the easiest way to do it, right? Otherwise, you’re gonna be toiling with things. That’s why I created a free training—a training that not only shows you how you got to where you are, where your relationship is missing that love, respect, admiration, and even intimacy that it used to have—but how you get it back.
How do you retain that, where your wife’s looking at you the same way she used to look at you when she said, “I do”? You know, I don’t know about you, but for me, when my wife looks at me like I’m her man, I feel like I can conquer the world. And I want that for you. Simply go over to thepowerfulman.com/scales. That’s thepowerfulman.com/scales, and I have a free video training for you. You can just click play and see if this resonates for you. Now, back to the podcast.
Dr. Phil Batterson 16:56
Where there may be some benefits is sauna. So if you do have a sauna, you could use that on off days for 20 to 30 minutes. Doesn’t need to be a crazy long amount of time, and there’s definitely been shown to be cardiovascular benefits for that. There was just—just recently—a study that was published. They were looking at older men, but I imagine it probably applies to sedentary individuals as well, where they did three sessions of sauna throughout a week—I think for 30 minutes—probably really hot, so it was not comfortable.
But they showed increased capillary growth and cardiovascular benefits and those sorts of things. So it is a way of kind of adding extra stress—because, again, your body only adapts if you have stress on it. So it’s a way of adding stress, but to say that it’s going to be the same as exercise—and a well thought-out exercise plan—you can’t compare them.
Doug Holt 18:06
No, I’m thinking about it from the recovery aspect.
Dr. Phil Batterson 18:09
Yeah. So from that perspective, again, I think it’s more along the mental side of things. You go in, and it’s the only thing you can think about. Psychologically, it’s probably decent because you’re having a pretty big spike in stress, and then it’s going away because you’re taking yourself out of that situation. But from a physical perspective, I would say most people—you’re not doing enough to warrant, you know, an NFL ice bath sort of thing.
Doug Holt
Sure.
Dr. Phil Batterson
Because those guys are getting clobbered all the time. They need the ice bath because they have acute trauma to their body. That’s like—because a Mack truck hit them.
Doug Holt
Yes.
Dr. Phil Batterson
But for the regular, everyday person, I would say: use it more as a psychological tool rather than thinking of it as a recovery tool. Okay?
Doug Holt 19:01
So going back full circle, we’re talking about, hey, double down in recovery. Start off maybe three times a week, and that recovery looks like optimal sleep. We teach the men something we call the Alpha Decompression Routine, okay, which is a way of resetting after work—like so you don’t walk through the house as the guy you are at the office, right? A lot of guys fall into that. They start treating their wife like an employee, their kids like employees. They’re in that mental state of just stress. So decompressing from that, doing breath work—which we teach the men to do as well—get the TV out of the bedroom. That’s the biggest sex and intimacy killer there possibly could be. And then just really getting yourself in a state of recovery, focusing on that and getting your protein in.
Dr. Phil Batterson 19:49
Yeah. Start—the recovery starts, you know, with the brain. Because if your brain feels—if you can perceive that you feel comfortable—then your body, the rest of it kind of follows suit. So yes, that’s what—you know, it sounds very simple, you know, “Oh, just do 10 minutes of box breathing and walking after your workout.” You know, do the—what did you call it?
Doug Holt
The Alpha Decompression.
Dr. Phil Batterson
Alpha Decompression, like after work. Yep. My fiancée and I call it “bridging activities,” you know, where—you know, you have—like, we’re both entrepreneurs that work out of the house. So it’s, you know, it’s hard to then transition sometimes. Like, okay, well, what’s our bridging activity today? It’s taking the dogs for a walk, going out and feeding the horses, it’s just walking around the property. It’s doing those sorts of things so you’re separating, you know, kind of the stress of life—like the stress of work—and then being present, you know, actually in life. Cooking for me actually is a great kind of bridging activity when I’m not super busy.
Doug Holt
I can see that.
Dr. Phil Batterson
So it’s those. And then, you know, focus on your kind of adequate calories. So you, first and foremost—like if you’re in a calorie deficit but also trying to build muscle, it’s gonna be hard. But focus on protein—upwards of one gram per pound of body weight. There’s somebody else who actually commented, you were reading, that increased their carbohydrates as well, and was actually able to decrease their body fat percentage by 10% and gain muscle mass at the same time.
So think about macronutrient distribution. If you’re doing hard exercise, you absolutely need carbohydrates in order to facilitate that high-intensity exercise. And if you’re always reducing carbohydrates, you’ll lose a bunch of weight in the beginning because you’ll just lose it as water weight as you burn off a bunch of carbs, and then you dissociate the carbs from the water. But you will definitely lose the ability to do that high-intensity stuff—as high intensity as you should be doing.
Doug Holt 21:58
Oh, when I was doing CrossFit—that I was telling you in the morning—there’s a guy on the platform next to me who started doing the carnivore diet, and he just boinked. He couldn’t get it right. And so I felt for him. I’d done the carnivore diet myself. I’ve done all kinds of things. And you do—there is a time when, obviously, you go through ketosis, and it’s a whole other methodology, or, you know, you’re not going to hit optimal levels. But for some people, especially obese people, that could be an option for them, right?
Dr. Phil Batterson 22:26
Yeah. It’s—you know, all of this stuff is highly individualized, as we talked about in the first podcast. And, like, I’ve done the ketogenic diet, and it was like the worst thing possible for me. I’m a high-stress individual who does high-stress exercise. Kept doing the high-stress exercise, couldn’t eat enough calories, my testosterone was down below 200. I couldn’t sleep well. I always felt like shit because I was just overdoing it and under-fueling. So it just—it didn’t work for me. But I’ve also met people who it works tremendously for them.
Doug Holt 23:02
Yeah, we don’t have to go down the nutrition rabbit hole.
Dr. Phil Batterson 23:05
Yeah, but I’m just saying, like, nutrition is an important factor here, but it’s all about focusing—like, what are the biggest rocks we can turn over, you know? So from a nutrition standpoint. Eat the amount of calories that you need for whatever weight management, weight loss, or weight gain goal that you have. Eat enough protein to facilitate that. And then eat enough either carbohydrates or fats, depending on the exercise intensity that you’re actually doing.
Doug Holt 23:30
Love it. So what I’m hearing you say is I don’t have to go to the gym seven days a week for three hours. It’s so funny. So I started working out with one of the guys that works with TPM. He’s one of our advisors, and he happened to relocate to Sisters, Oregon, so we hit the gym, you know, four or five days a week, depending. And one of the things he said to me, he’s like, “Man, I have friends who are, quote, legit fitness influencers.” You know, he’s like, “They give me workouts that are like two hours long, and you and I are in and out of here in 45 minutes. Like, it’s so much more enjoyable.”
I think people don’t realize, unless you’re a fitness influencer, you know, your testosterone goes down after 45 minutes. Like, you start to go into a catabolic state— all these other bad things happen to your body, unless you’re truly a high-end athlete.
Dr. Phil Batterson 24:22
Yeah, or feeling yourself within the workout as well, right? It’s the law of diminishing returns. Sure, you can get probably the most benefit out of the first 30–45 minutes, and then after that, it’s kind of like, you know, plateaus in terms of benefits. Obviously, the higher-end athlete you are, the more you probably have to work. But that also comes with the recovery aspect of things. You need more stress.
So I would say, just to kind of go back to, you know, you can probably gain a lot from three days a week. What we’re working on—you did a VO₂ max test. We identified that, you know, you’re not doing too much cardiovascular work. And from the little devices we put on your muscles, we recognized that your mitochondria actually aren’t able to extract as much oxygen as we would hope for. So using kind of all of that information, what I prescribed was four times: 30 seconds on, two and a half to four and a half minutes off.
And those 30 seconds are as hard as you can possibly make them—hill sprints, right? Hill sprints. So that’s a 16-minute workout. And then you get to go to the gym and reward yourself for doing that by doing strength training. And I think for most people, doing whole-body strength training three days a week, and then, you know, like, two—I wouldn’t do many more than two—high-intensity or sprint interval training days a week, you know, that’s a really, really good place to start. That’s a great place.
Like, you could probably do that for a really, really long time. And as long as you are progressively overloading—which means increasing your weights, getting faster, maybe increasing the amount of reps or sprints you’re doing—you could probably improve for a year, if not years.
Doug Holt 26:18
Yeah. I mean, I had a friend—she’s got a doctorate in exercise fizz but also a doctorate in physical therapy. And I was talking to her because I recently had an MRI on my shoulder, and she goes, “What are you doing?” I’m like, “What do you mean? What am I doing?” She’s like, “Doug, you’re not 20 anymore. Like, you’re working out like—you don’t have to lift that much weight in deadlifts. You don’t have to do all these things to your body. Like, science is showing us three days a week is probably—you can probably get away with four.”
And I think when I think about it, it was almost like that, “Oh, I forget that I’m 48.” It doesn’t cross my mind ever unless I have to talk about my age. And I think a lot of men are like that. We forget that we haven’t worked out for a while. We forget that there’s limitations—or we choose not to recognize that our body has changed and things have changed.
And for this gentleman, like saying, “I feel stiffer”—well, you’re working at a desk more. Are you hydrating? There are all these life changes that have come about where you’re going to be stiffer than you were probably in your early 20s.
Dr. Phil Batterson 27:23
Yeah, absolutely. The stiffness thing is challenging because, like you said, it can come from a ton of different things, but I would say that moving your body also acts as kind of like lubrication for your joints. So on those off days—if you’re going Monday, Wednesday, Friday to the gym, or just Tuesday, Thursday to the gym—you’re doing your sprint interval training, then you’re doing some whole-body compound movement strength training.
On those off days, try to park a little bit farther at work. You know, if you’re an executive at the office, I totally understand you’re super busy, but it means a lot to your employees for you to walk around and not be like, “What are you doing?” but just like talking to them, right? And being human. And that also gives you the benefit of actually being able to move and get some steps in. And/or treadmill desk—those are also great. You don’t have to do eight hours of treadmill desk a day. You know, start with 10 minutes every two hours because that’s at least breaking up that sitting, sedentary time.
Doug Holt 28:36
I do with some of my coaching clients—I’m always on the treadmill. Or I do what’s called walk-and-talks. “Let’s jump on a phone call. You’re gonna go walking, I’m gonna go walking.” I also—you have an Oura ring on. I have an Oura ring that’ll tell you, like, “Hey, stretch your legs a little bit,” right? WHOOP bands do something similar. I think Apple Watches do as well.
So there’s a lot of, you know, devices that you could set for yourself or, you know, set an alarm. We all have smartphones these days—set an alarm for every, you know, 45 minutes or whatever it is, just to get yourself moving.
Dr. Phil Batterson 29:06
Yeah. It really is—like, you know, the more we talk about this, I’m just like—the simpler it is, the more implementable it’s going to be for your life. Sure, you know, I think one of the reasons why I am kind of hesitant on things like cold plunge and ice or, you know, like ice baths, saunas, those sorts of things is because they also are just like… challenging in a sense.
Which, it’s okay to challenge yourself, but it’s, you know, on the hierarchy of things, like ice bath and sauna are probably pretty low on the totem pole. Whereas all the other things we talked about—like making sure you’re developing yourself cardiovascularly—just that in and of itself will, as you develop your VO₂ max, so like the ceiling of your aerobic capacity, it’s going to make you feel better throughout the day because now everything you’re doing isn’t 75% max effort, it’s 45 or 50% max effort.
Doug Holt 30:12
Sure. I love it, man. Thanks so much for helping out the guys and the movement and everything else that you’re doing. If guys—we’ll put it in the show notes like we did last time—but if guys want to follow you, I know you have a podcast or you’re on Instagram. What’s the best way for people to find out more?
Dr. Phil Batterson 30:26
Yeah, reach out to me on Instagram: @drphilbatterson. I also have a podcast called Critical Oxygen. It’s got about 100 episodes. It’s primarily geared towards high-performance athletes and those sorts of things, but also super nerdy science talks. So if you are into that and you just want to learn more, listen to that while you’re going for your daily walks and stuff like that.
I think it provides tremendous value for people. But again, it is kind of derived for that high-performing, say, triathlete, endurance runner—those sorts of things. And I’m here to help, you know, whether you’re starting from zero or pursuing any of those big goals, like hiking a mountain, doing an Ironman, doing other things like that. I have tools in my toolbox that can help all athletes—businessmen, whoever it is. And my goal is that I just want to help the individual who’s in front of me.
Doug Holt 31:28
Love it. Awesome. Well guys, there’s a lot of information there for you. And if you’re like most men, you make things overcomplicated. Like, well, some of us will go, “I need to get the ice bath before I can get started,” or you add too many things to your routine. I get it, right? I’m one of those guys too. But you want to start. And I always say, hey, in the moment of insight, take massive action. So write down what is going to be your massive action step. Maybe it’s just getting started—strap on the shoes and go for a walk.
Call an accountability partner, right? Have somebody else—especially another guy in the movement—that you guys just go for a walk and talk. You just talk as you’re moving your bodies. Or maybe you’re training for your Ironman and maybe you need to back it down a little bit, or work with somebody like Phil to actually help you hone in those things. But whatever you do, take action. Do something—even if it’s the smallest micro thing you can do—because that’s going to give you momentum.
As always, guys, thank you for being here, and we’ll see you next time on The Powerful Man Show.
