Winning The Mental Battle of Physical Fitness and Obesity | Ogie Shaw | TEDxSpokane

[Applause] is exercise important heart disease cancer diabetes one of the things they all have in common is they can be affected by obesity the first recorded heart attack in this country was in 1896 in 1896 in this country you had to get exercise they go to the bathroom everybody lived on farms well we got smart we started building machines to help us get our work done we moved to the cities and started pushing buttons for a living and pushing the wrong button could really create a lot of stress and we started noticing that people starting

to die from clogging the arteries by the Korean War half the soldiers averaging 19 years of age killed during that war showed significant blockage of coronary arteries 1956 the eisenhart administration had a big meeting in Washington DC the military was noticing something funny starting to happen it was becoming increasingly difficult to find Young American men who could pass the induction physicals for the military they wanted to figure out who to blame what's the problem they looked into the public schools and some researchers had done Fitness tests involving the uh ability of our students at the

high school and Junior High School level to perform what they call functional movements just everyday things you might have to do on your job in your lives like uh you know can you bend over and you touch your toes you know at 16 years of age you should be able to put your toes in your mouth we thought that was the dumbest idea anybody ever came up with to test kids for physical fitness because we thought that kids are fit just because they're young 57.8% of our kids fail that test we said that can't be

right if that's true we have the most unfit kids in the world and folks that's just not possible so they decided take the test to the kids and give it to kids in Europe 7% fail ah they shop that test all over the world could not find another group of kids on the planet that had anywhere close to a 7% failure rate on that test a 57% failure rate on that test he came back and started what eventually became the president's Council on physical fitness and sports after over 40 years now everywhere you turn somebody's

been trying to put you and your kids on exercise programs and then we got another bright idea why don't we check to see how fit we become 40% of us are still enthusiastically avoiding exercise 50% are exercising and still in lousy shape about 10% are keeping fit University of Indiana measured the fitness level of 4 million kids between six and 17 years of age and found in the middle of all this hoopla about exercise 57% of our kids are still failing Fitness tests and fitness leaders say they're worse now than they were 30 years ago

we're finding 14 to 19 old kids with 40% block at the coronary arteries what used to be called adult onset diabetes is now showing up in kids between four and 10 years of age they say we're raising the first generation that will have a shorter life expectancy than either their parents or grandparents it has never before happened in our history the state of Oregon has the highest rate of obesity of any state west of Rockies our public schools are being gutted because of budget cuts and the first thing we always cut is physical education they

formed an Oregon Health policy commission to tell us how to solve this problem they published a 65-page report which basically said we don't know but they said this children's behaviors are substantially affected by the influential adults in their lives parents grandparents and teachers efforts to address childhood obesity in Oregon will not be successful unless they also include interventions that influence the healthy eating and physical activity behaviors of adults as well as children now they warded this message down a bit in their final draft but the idea was out how many of you get all the

exercise you need and if not why not well the two most common objections are what do you think it is number one I don't have time every time we've asked I don't have time number two and this surprised me how often they stay and how boldly they stated was I'm too lazy to do it even when I do have time or the way the way one guy in South Carolina said it I swear after college I'd never sweat again let's just call it lack of motivation but every time we in the medical and fitness field

had been bold enough to ask why don't you do it you've been incredibly honest and you've been incredibly consistent you said two things over and over and over and over again I don't have time and I don't know how to stay motivated to exercise and you would think all medical and fitness leaders who cared would have scheduled a National Convention somewhere got into a big room and said let's just solve these two problems it has never happened as Fitness leaders we're not trained to deal with I don't have time and I don't know how to

stay motivated to exercise I almost changed my major at the University of North Carolina when I heard some guy from California say exercise to my wife is to take a bath pull the plug and fight the current what they teach us to say is yeah got to make exercise fun you ever heard that it's all over the place make it fun make it folks over the past 39 years I put over 10,000 Americans on exercise programs and I'm here to tell you I've learned a lot about exercise one of the things I've learned is if

what you're doing for exercise is fun I guarantee you you're not doing it right there are physiological requirements that must be met in order to benefit from your exercise program whether you like it or not the intensity the duration the frequency of your exercise are all more important than whether or not it's fun you must work every muscle in the body the cardiovascular system flexibility muscle balance muscle strength and there's no single activity or exercise that we know of that adequately Works your total body if you don't sit down and design a total body workout

it isn't going to happen so how do you solve this problem well I got to meet Dr Mark anchel Dr Mark anchel has a dual professorship at Middle Tennessee State University in Murphysboro a dual professorship in the department of psychology and Health and Human Performance he wrote an article conceptualizing a new fitness major he was going to call Applied exercise psychology which would have been what I majored in had it existed when I was in school but basically what he had done is wrote an article to the uh Journal of the board of uh sports

psychology explaining what he saw was justification for this new fitness major and explaining the problems he saw in physical fitness and it almost exactly mirrored what I've been speaking on for over 30 years to the point where I wanted to meet this guy so I flew back to to Nashville drove down to Murphy's buror looked him up in his office went up to him gave him a great big bear hug and said you're my hero and he called for security and uh no it no that didn't happen but but I explained him what I was

doing and and and he was so appreciative of that and and uh has a new book out and promised to send me a new copy which I haven't gotten yet um but uh but what he basically said is this this Fitness problem is more about our mental failures than our physical failures it's more about your head your attitude than it is about your body he said you just can't decide to exercise and have it sustain you for the rest of your life so your brain's going to fight you you say I'm going to start an

exercise program your brain says what are you doing haven't we been down this road look at you look at your dog but he says you have to win the mental battle and it's tough one guy said he got in his car decid to go to the health club he got down to the intersection the light turned red he said that's a sign turned around and went back home but if you can win the mental battle for five consecutive years you will never go back to your previously sary lifestyle but you got to keep it up

how do you win the psychological battle associated with getting ourselves to exercise well make it just that a lifestyle it becom has to become a habit now we know that rather than working out every day excuse me seven day three days a week the way we've been taught working out seven days a week or according to American College of sports medicine work out most days or every day I said thank you I've been saying that for over 30 years see it's easier to work out every day than it is to work out three days a

week three days a week gives you too many decisions Monday Wednesday Friday Tuesday Thursday Saturday can I skip today and double up tomorrow folks if you're negotiating about where the to work out it's over do you work out first thing in the morning you have a 300% greater chance of getting it done than at any other time of day because you have more control over your schedule first day in the morning than any other time of day try to confine your workout time to 20 minutes or less the more time you spend exercising the less

likely you are to do it and the more likely you are to get injured will keep you from doing it anyway and then work against resistance if you work against resistance you get tired faster now the most important rule in exercise physiology is called the overload principle it says no benefit occurs in any exercise program until you get tired the problem is as you get more fit what happens to the amount of work you have to do to get tired it goes up in the public schools they did studies on high school boys and ask

them to do as many push-ups as they could every day until they get got tired do that every day for a year the boys who could do five push-ups on the first day after year we're doing between 100 and 120 to get to the same level of fatigue that five got them on the first day we're talking Major League boredom even if you do have time so then we said we'll just go on a diet well folks the quickest way I know to get an American fat is to go on a diet don't ever diet

another day the rest of your life eat for nutrition never eat for weight loss and never make any change in the way you eat that you're not willing to make permanent now there's a lot more I want to talk about nutrition but for lack of time let's just concentrate on on physical fitness today so s days a week first thing in the morning plan to spend about 20 minutes or less and then work against resistance so that as you become more fit you don't spend more time you work against more resistance so how do you

do that well I was speaking to the university rotary club in Seattle and one of the members came up when I was done and said I'm one of the editors for prce Hall publishing we're the largest publishing company in America we have a waiting list of people that want to write books on exercise nobody is telling us how to stay motivated and what you told us here today makes more sense than anything I've heard anywhere in the country we do a book for my company on fitness motivation and I said sure that was 30 years

ago and I haven't gotten motivated to do it yet but what I said was this the problem with Fitness is we don't know what Fitness is and the reason we don't know what Fitness is is because there's no such thing as generic Fitness Fitness is activity specific until you define what you're trying to get fit for the term has no meaning I've trained Portland Trailblazers and I've trained Seattle Seahawks I've trained real estate agents and I've trained plumbers totally different approach to Fitness depending on what I'm trying to get done in that fitness program so

what is the most universal appeal I can make for physical fitness and I came down with this health exercise being called the best medicine in America today outperforming almost every prescribed medication in the country in terms of its overall impact on our health everything from coals and flu to cancer is being impacted by exercise but you can't just pay lip service to the idea you actually have to do it so how much Fitness do we need in order to be healthy I said no problem I'll go to The Experts I went to the medical school

library in Portland to look up how fit you have to be to stay healthy and for the most part could find virtually nothing written on the subject some information on aerobic exercise but other than that there was nothing there so I went and talked with physiologist that I had known and and read about and asked them their in definition about physical fitness and there are already tests and Norms that had been established for the components that could make up Total Physical Fitness but nobody ever packaged it and said this is the level of Fitness he

wanted to have so that's exactly what I did I put together what I contended was a level of Fitness sufficient to stay healthy and for 14 years took my definition around the medical societies and College physiology departments trying to get somebody to disagree with me and to date have not found one disagreement on one item on my test so I turned it into a business that's still going now in in uh in Beav in Oregon and then I wanted to get it even out farther to the general public so I got on the speaker sech

and start teaching the general public how to measure their own physical fitness that be will be sufficient to impact your health both physical and mental health by the way and the test which you'll believe will have a copy of later says this here's your test that you can do at home I want you to be flexible enough to sit on the floor with your legs straight and reach your fingertips at least 5 Ines past your toes most men can't touch their toes some of you haven't seen them in 5 years why is flexibility that big

a deal because one of the leading causes of not showing up for work in America is my back hurts 85% of the back pain in America today is being traced to people with tight back muscles caused by weak stomach muscles because you sit so much when the stomach muscles go on vacation the back muscles have to work overtime they tighten up you been over to pick up a pencil and you all work for 6 weeks strengthen your abdominal muscles and stretch your lower back in 85% of an 80 to 100 billion doll problem will either

lessen or go away completely but none of you can strengthen your abdominal muscles by taking Don's pills you have to exercise I want you to have enough cardio vas endurance to be able to step up and down on a 16 and a qu inch box chair or stool or an 8 in stare for three consecutive minutes take the Pulse for 15 seconds and multiply the Beats by four if your pulse is higher than 144 beats a minute for men or 156 beats a minute 156 beats a minute for women on a 16 and a qu

inch step you just fail the test and 75% of the people in this room if you're typical will fail that test a lot of you Runners don't have good cardiovascular fitness but nobody's been explain that to you that test will and it's not my test I didn't make it up it's out there being used by the research community and then finally keep track of your body fat one lady started a 15 m a week jogging program with lightweight training hoping to lose weight she gain 8 lbs but drop Six dress sizes because muscle is heavier

than fat and takes up less space this is a skinfold caliber I've been taking it everywhere I go every time I speak for over 30 years it measures subcutaneous body fat half the fat in your body is stored directly beneath the skin I can pinch the thickness of your skin and the upper back and the thigh for men upper arm and the waistline for women I can fairly accurately tell you how much body fat you have women shouldn't carry more than 20% men no more than 15% if you're carrying more than that you tend to

be more prone to everything from Co and flu to cancer and by the way for you researchers this is Sloan's formula that I'm using for estimating body fat and I'll be happy to stay around at the end of the day and do body fat percentages for anybody who wants to have that done it's the quickest way I know to clear the room and if you don't have a skinfold caliber keep track of your body shape if you're losing inches but you're not losing pounds what are you losing fat and that's a good thing so keep

track of your shape for men you should at least drop your keep track of your waistline if you're dropping body fat you almost always are dropping the waistline measurement for men it's excuse me for women it's the hip measurement keep track of your hip measurement I found if you're dropping body fat you almost always are dropping the hip measurement so your body's giving you the information you need to motivate you but you have to know how to read your body this is stuff we should have taught you back in grade school and we didn't a

major price for it as a nation and finally don't forget to fit exercise into your busy schedule three basic things you want to remember with doing that number one I want you to work out every day I want you to work out first thing in the morning every day first thing in the morning 20 minutes or less and then work against resistance but here are the motivational principles that I want say I want you to um Define what Fitness is until you gain agreement about what you're trying to do you're in deep trouble two then

I want you to measure Fitness measuring Fitness is a way of identifying what the need is focusing on the need is the thing that motivates you to do it and take it seriously and three I want you to reward physical fitness isn't that important to get recognition for doing it I found one of the most effective reward tools I've ever found for physical fitness is the belief that you're intrinsically doing something that will impact your health it is the most powerful reason for exercise but beyond that here's what comes in number two little sticker stars

and paper certificates some of the top Executives in the state of Oregon I've had rearranging our schedule to get their next Dicker star this stuff works okay so Define Fitness measure Fitness and reward Fitness thank you