Episode 1793 - Over-optimization: taking perfection too far
#PTonICE Podcast
The Paradox of Health Optimization and Perfectionism
This chapter addresses the pitfalls of striving for perfection in health and wellness, illustrating how this pursuit can create more confusion and stress. It highlights the importance of focusing on foundational health practices rather than getting lost in complex optimization trends.
Dr. Joe Hanisko // #FitnessAthleteFriday // www.ptonice.com
In today's episode of the PT on ICE Daily Show, Fitness Athlete lead faculty Joe Hanisko discusses the concept of maximizing health & fitness. What is the most optimal route for most people?
Take a listen to the episode or check out the full show notes on our blog at www.ptonice.com/blog
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION
JOE HANISKOThis is Fitness Athlete Friday. I want to welcome you to the PT on Ice Daily Show with the Institute of Clinical Excellence. My name is Joe Hanisco. I am one of the Lean faculty alongside Mitch Babcock and Zach Long in the Fitness Athlete Division. In terms of what we have going on in the Fitness Athlete Division, we'll quickly chat on that before we get rolling on the topic of over-optimization today. We are kind of wrapping up our year in 2024. We can see the end of the fall coming in and we have a few more live courses, three or four courses in the state of Colorado coming up here shortly in April. We have Texas coming as well and I know Mitch is going to be ending out the year down in Florida trying to get some sunshine down there. So if you're looking to get on one of our live courses, we have three or four left in those areas kind of spread out nicely across the U.S. I know that we are also about to kick off our Level 2 online course here in September shortly. So beginning of September, if you're looking to get on to Level 2 Clinical Management of Fitness Athlete online, hop onto that. If you're trying to complete your certification or get through that process, We only offer that course twice a year, so it's going to be a few more months before we get back on top of that. But yeah, I'm looking forward to meeting you guys and hopefully catching you on the road here. Over-optimization. I'll have to be clear when I dive into this because I think a lot of us, especially at ICE and our following and all you guys out there in the Army, we love health. We love wellness. We love to optimize and perform. at our best and I think that's great that we're putting our minds into what makes us better humans, better athletes, makes our clients healthier and happier people as well. But lately I've been fielding a lot of questions from my clients on optimization and how to maximize their health. And what I'm starting to see is a trend here in which there's a few things happening and that people are putting so much energy into being perfect that it's kind of coming back to haunt them. and or they're forgetting the basics and I wanted to chat about that. You know you think about optimization from a health metric standpoint you have to think about time investment and sometimes financially investing into this as well but from a time perspective you think I have 24 hours in a day to make the best decisions for myself in terms of my health and well-being And right off the get-go, 30-ish percent of that should be consumed with just proper sleep. If we're getting six, eight, 10 hours of sleep, you're getting a good 30 to 40% of your 24-hour day wrapped up in sleep, which is fantastic, but what I'm getting at there is already a big chunk of time is removed from one thing that should be optimizing your health, which is sleep, and we should be prioritizing that, but that's a chunk of time that you're already devoting to your health and wellness. that leaves you with, you know, 14, 16 hours or so. And most of us are working professionals, and we probably spend six to 10 hours a day working. So you add your eight to hours of sleep to maybe six to 10 hours of work and you quickly are eating up 75% of your time and that leaves maybe 20, 15, 20, 30% of your day left over to make decisions that are kind of not being made for you at this point. And this is where the extra optimization stuff would fall into. But again, what I want to get at here is that in that small chunk of time, you guys are all real humans just like me where we have, uh, after our work day, we have kids that we have to take care of. We might have games that we have to go to. We have grocery shopping, we have meal prepping, we have yard work to do, you name it. We have responsibilities and that 20% that we have left over our day starts to get whittled down to very little time to, uh, to be strategizing what is the best effort to help maximizing my health, my fitness journey outside of the things. that I'm already doing and outside of the time that I'm devoting to work and to sleep, a big chunk of what our 24 hour day gets eaten up into. So what I'm getting at here is when I have clients come in, they're talking about, Hey Joe, do I invest time or money into a cold blanch or maybe a sauna? Which one do I go with? Like which one's going to give me the best benefit? And then they roll into, well, I heard about red light tables and laying in one of those might be helpful for cellular repair and reproduction, which is I think possible, but also, Getting out there a little bit Or do I go and invest time into this laser? Therapy that I've heard is helpful or half possibly, you know during my workouts I'm trying to do some CrossFit stuff stuff and some strength workouts But how many days a week and how much time do I have to invest into? zone two training and then yesterday Joe I listened to a podcast about vo2 max and how Although zone two may help with your VO2 max, high intensity, more interval style training is going to be even more beneficial for my VO2 max. I should certainly do that because that's correlated with mortality. But I can't forget that just building muscle is also correlated with mortality. And then after I do all that, I would like to make sure I have time to breathe and do some meditation and work on some cyclic sighing or some box breathing technique for 15 or 20 minutes a day. But which one should I choose? Should I do nasal breathing stuff? Should I focus on the cyclic sign? And it should leave me some time to then hopefully organize all my supplements because I know that I have inflammation in my body and ashwagandha is gonna be helpful for that. And I'm already trying to take creatine and I heard that magnesium might help me with my sleep so I should probably think about buying some magnesium and figuring out when to put that into my life. And then before I make any decisions, I should certainly go talk to a healthcare professional about getting advanced blood panels and screens done so that I know where all my metrics are so that I can make the best decisions for those supplements and I'll slap on a CGM at the end to make sure that my blood glucose isn't out of control. I hope that was confusing as I ran through that because it is confusing. We have so many freaking things out there now in the last probably, I feel like the popularity has really spurted up here in the last three years maybe now, but certainly every year it seems to be putting more and more energy in. How do I be perfect? How do I make my human body as perfect as can be? Hear me loud and clear. I support people in making good decisions. I try to make good decisions myself. I have been interested in some of these optimization techniques and I have also pursued some of these optimization techniques and theories. What I'm getting at now is that I'm sensing and there's this palpable level of stress that is coming alongside with people trying to be optimized in their health journeys. They are putting so much time and energy into Researching listening and figuring out what is best that they might actually missing the opportunity to do one thing really really good for themselves and therefore not see the benefit or if they are putting energy into optimizing This palpable stress that I'm feeling now, I feel like is actually creating the problem. And the problem is perfection. The stress that comes with being perfect, I feel like could drastically, especially in the everyday human like us, drastically outweigh the benefits of what those optimization tactics are trying to lead to. This is just sort of a paradox now that we're stuck in between how much time and what techniques am I and should I be willing to invest in to see the best outcomes on my overall health and wellness and where do I put them into my daily routine? I think this is the big paradox that we are running into. So my purpose of this talk today was not to necessarily dive into the weeds on cold plunging and red light and supplements I think there's enough research out there, and really the research, like most research, tends to be somewhere in the middle on a lot of these things, that yes, there could be a benefit. Sometimes I believe the benefit is in that upper 1%, meaning that it might make a small change, and so therefore, statistically, there is a benefit. we might be missing a greater opportunity for change focusing on other things. Or it's 50-50 just because some things work for some people and some things don't work for other people or how you execute that in terms of a protocol may not be optimal. So for an example, I know that a lot of people who have invested into red light I'm sorry, to sauna and heat exposure are doing so without really diving into the literature and showing that much of the research, especially the Finnish research that has all the proposed benefits of cardiovascular health with heat exposure. The duration and the heat intensity of these things is insane like most of us don't have a sauna if we're using like a red light Infrared sauna for example that will ever get to the 150 60 70 or higher range like some of these studies are having people who are able to spend 15 to 30 minutes a day or more in a true sauna and that is reaching 180 plus degrees. And then they're reporting results of these cardiovascular benefits. And then people over here in the US are just jumping into the 120, 130 degree infrared sauna and spending 15 minutes there a couple of times a week, uh, and rather than every single day. And then assuming that they're getting that benefit, which I don't know if that is true. I don't know if that will help. I, I can't say that there's been research to show that if you do it halfway that you'll get the same results. Uh, but also it's possible that people are wasting their time with that was what I'm getting at. And so, So this is where it gets like a really slippery slope. So the purpose of this chat today was not to get into the weeds, not to get into the science behind it, but to get into a very clear reminder that the palpable stress that I am feeling as a clinician in terms of conversations is real. I know that it is out there. And I think that what we need to be doing is reminding ourselves and our clients that what they have to be focusing on first is taking their meds. This is an abbreviation that we've used at ICE over the last couple of years now that If we can invest in taking our meds, meaning the M of meds is the mental health side of things. If we can focus on doing something that we enjoy doing for our mental health, putting time and effort into relationships, whether it's with our spouse, our kids, our friends, or all of the above, maximizing our relationships are going to be huge. That is the mental health portion that we certainly cannot deny has a massive contribution to our wellness, our longevity, and our overall well-being. The E is exercise. I think we're all on board that exercise seems to be the most consistent in terms of improving people's health, physical and mental health. And there are a lot of ways to exercise. Find the thing that you love the most and stick to it. If that means that you aren't getting in strength every single day, VO2 max training every single day, Zone 2 training every single day, mobility work every single day, or some combination of that, that is okay. Find something you enjoy doing, help your clients understand that the idea should be that consistent daily movement is the goal and that it doesn't have to be perfect. You don't have to hit every protocol and everybody's understanding what it takes to be maximal, but you need to invest in exercise. That is big. Move daily, find what you love to do and repeat that over and over again. So the M, mental health meditation. the E, exercise, the D, the diet side of things. There are a thousand diets. We know that research on nutrition and dietary information is scattered because humans respond differently to different approaches, but also because there are many different ways to do this well. But we want to remember for most people it's going to come down to maximizing the types of food that they put into their body, the quality of food that they're putting into their body. Choose whole foods. Choose foods that come directly from the earth. Whether you're vegan and you eat nothing but fruits and vegetables and grains or you're a carnivore and you're eating, you know, ribeye steaks every single day. I don't care what that is. If it comes from the earth, you're probably making a better decision than if it comes from a box. Dial that in, maximize your protein intake because we know that the research is very consistent, that the more protein we get in across our lifespan for all different reasons will help with longevity, will help with health, help with performance, and then focus on reducing but also balancing the negatives. Reducing your alcohol intake, reducing your overall sugar intake, possibly the seed oil conversation comes into this as well. But balance that out because when we go zero to 100 on that, a lot of times people are going to slip. They're going to make mistakes and I think that can sometimes lead to frustrations or thinking that they're not getting the best benefit from doing so. And we do know that balance is okay with nutrition. If 80 to 90% of your choices are the right choice, that five, 10, 15% slip here or there that going out with your family and enjoying pizza and maybe a beer with some friends. you're going to be okay. So with the diet, we focus on real foods. We focus on protein intake and we focus on balance, balancing the negatives, reducing them as much as possible, but balancing and enjoying our life because that will tie back into our relationships and the mental health. And last but not least, and we've already touched on this a little bit, is the S, the sleep side of things. Like as much as you can get is clean and clear and the quality as best as you can get. That is what we need to focus on. I think the biggest piece of advice from most literature, that I've read in the time that I've spent looking into sleep is that if you can make your sleep life consistent, if you can go to bed within 30 minutes of a certain time, if you pick 10 p.m. as your goal time and you're in bed by 930 to 1030 or around 10 o'clock every day and you're getting up at the exact same time, give or take 30 minutes or so on either end, you're going to be in a good spot there to help balance out rhythms, circadian rhythms and hormones in the body and you can put as much time into that quality sleep as you can get and you're going to be in a great spot there. So I think we need to not completely disown these optimization tactics. I am not saying that you couldn't and you won't possibly see benefits from cold plunging and sauna. You very well could be or from red light or nasal breathing and just certain meditation tactics or certain supplements. Yes, there's value in those. What I am saying is that if you're trying to maximize everything, you are going to see that. I think that the stress, the palpable stress of being over optimal will outweigh the benefits of the optimization itself. So our resolution, we focus on taking our meds. We would take them every single day, mental health, exercise, diet, and nutrition, and sleep. Take our meds. I hate to break it to you all, but I don't think yet that we're at a spot where you're going to live forever. What I think we need to be focusing on is that we can maximize the time that we do have on earth here. And that comes down to not only doing the right things, the right choices, but balancing them in a way that we can enjoy our life and not feel constantly stressed by the decisions that we're making. You're given your, your panel of genetics when you're born. There's not much that we can do about your genetics, so don't stress too much about your genetics. Your epigenetics, what you can do with your environment and how your genetics might play out is more important. If you have slightly higher cholesterol because it seems to be a genetic component of your body, Don't lose control over that. Maximize your meds. Not literally pharmaceutical meds, but the meds that we talked about and put as much energy into that healthy lifestyle, exercise, diet, everything there. And I think you're going to be better than the average. You're going to turn out okay. Take advantage of your time. Enjoy your time here on earth, guys. Take your meds, do the right things. If you feel like you want to dabble in one or two optimization techniques, that is perfectly okay. But don't let the stress of optimization outweigh the benefits of just living a healthy lifestyle. Hopefully this is a good reminder. Hopefully you can take these conversations to your clients or to yourself. Sometimes for me, even it was a gut check at times. So happy to kick off your Friday here, Fitness Athlete Friday, but this is probably more of a general topic on health and wellness. I'll look to see you guys in the row over the next couple of months. I'll be in Colorado, April 13th, 14th, I think, Long Mountain, Colorado, just north of Denver with my last CMFA course for the year. at least live and hopefully we'll see you on the level two guys. Have a great Friday. We'll talk to you later.
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