(upbeat music) - Welcome everybody. Thanks so much for tuning in to this inaugural Building Lifelong Athletes podcast. This is the first podcast of this series and I'm super excited to start this. For those of you who don't know, my name is Jordan Rennike. I am currently a sports medicine physician and love all things health and wellness. And I wanted to kind of start this project to share my thoughts, opinions, and help me learn along the way. As I learn things, I wanna share them with you and really I view this whole process as me having an accountability partner to learn things and then share what I'm learning to help you not only live a healthier life, but also implement them in your day-to-day life. So I'm super, super excited to get started. Today we're gonna start off with a general idea, general topic of what constitutes good health? What are the key things that kind of add in to making you a healthy person? So I kind of distilled it down to nine main topics that I look at. But I think what it's kind of, we can name it the necessary nine if we want to or give it some name like that. But at the end of the day, I think these nine topics, if you have these locked down, you're gonna be in really good shape. I'm a big believer of the 80/20 principle, meaning 20% of your efforts yield 80% of your results. And it's very similar to this. If you lock in these nine topics and nine concepts, I mean, that's gonna get you the vast majority of the benefits of health when we're talking about that. So we're gonna work through those nine topics today to kind of lay the foundation for everything else. These are kind of the big pillars of everything that I believe in in terms of how to live a healthy life, how to live it to the fullest and live your best life and be the lifelong athlete that you wanna be. And so pretty much everything I talk about from here on forward will be encompassed in some way, shape or form in one of these pillars. Obviously there's lots of nuance and some of them are, you know, a much bigger deep dive than others. But for me, it's kind of like, if I can talk about these nine things, we're gonna do a really, really good job of getting the best bang for our buck. So without any further ado, we'll get started here and we'll talk about number one. Number one is eating a health promoting diet. Now I intentionally left that vague because as you know, it's a very hot subject to your nutrition. If you go online and just doom scroll Twitter at night, you'll find, you know, everyone's talking about this diet, that diet, this diet is better than that diet. You know, this is better because of X, Y and Z. And at the end of the day, it's great. I think there's definitely merit to talking about things. I don't think there's merit to yelling at people over the internet. I don't think that's accomplishing anything for anyone, but that's a whole nother podcast. But as we're talking about here, there's certain concepts and certain cores to all these diets that we can extrapolate. We can pull out and use those to help us build that health promoting diet. And so when I say health promoting diet, what that means is it's kind of setting us up for success on the right track. And so obviously when we're eating a diet, there's things that you can restrict, whether that's macronutrients or total amount of calories or what have you. But at the end of the day, if you look at all these different diets, whether it's a low carbohydrate diet, a low fat diet, a keto diet, a calorie restricted diet, what have you, they all have certain things in common. And so the big things I wanna talk about with a health promoting diet, the big things I think about is you should either be focusing on removing certain foods or macronutrients. That's kind of the thing. Diet quality is what you can also look at too. And then also time restricted feeding. And so these big three pillars, so meaning, when I mean food or macronutrients, obviously some people have a preference, whether that is they enjoy eating lots and lots of red meat, or they enjoy eating lots and lots of vegetables or don't wanna have any animal products, it's okay. I still think there's ways to do things better, you know, depending on what diet you have. But at the end of the day, when you're looking for a health promoting diet, there's three main knobs. It's either the time in which you're eating. So that's, you know, intermittent fasting and kind of caloric restricting in that way. Two is actually just counting calories. That can be a beneficial thing as well. And three is if you're not doing either one of those two, it's kind of limiting your macros or your total different type of nutrient that you're taking. And at the end of the day, those are important things in terms of, we have our macronutrients, we have our timing, we have our calories, but at the end of the day, you also should be checking on some biomarkers as well, kind of like looking at your labs and making sure that you're heading in the right direction. 'Cause it does no good to be eating a perfect diet, but if all your numbers are getting worse, then it's probably not the perfect diet for you. And so when it comes to eating a health promoting diet, what do all these things have in common besides, most of the time, are just caloric restricting for when we're trying to lose weight, but it's just eating whole unprocessed foods. That's really kind of what it comes down to. Some people will argue grains versus no grains. At the end of the day, as long as we agree Lucky Charms and Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, that is probably not the ideal diet that we should consist on. Although we can do that for a long amount of time for the very adaptive, but at the end of the day, whole unprocessed foods, meaning like whole grains, vegetables, fruits, lean meats, a nut based olive oils and fats, things like that, are kind of our ideal way of looking at it. But at the end of the day, everyone's gonna be different, you know? And that's the thing, I wanna just say this to everyone. Everyone's gonna be different. Everyone's gonna have a different philosophy. Everyone's gonna respond differently to different foods. And so that's the thing. If you say that, "Hey, I love keto. It's my favorite thing in the world," but your LDL is sky high, then that might not be the right type of keto for you or the right diet for you. Or if you say, "Hey, I really wanna be a vegan or a vegetarian," and then your hair starts falling out and your performance is terrible, that might not be the right move for you too. So really I'd say, instead of having a dogmatic approach to diet, think about the overarching principles, right? Those big three principles we talk about in terms of when you're eating, what you're eating, or how much you're eating, those three things. And then below that, kind of the quality of the food that we're eating. And if you start there, I think it's a really, really good place to start. Going on then to our next one. So we talked about diet. I kind of think that's like the pillar. That's like the base of the pillar. But then on top of that, and you know, right next to that, we also have physical activity. So getting enough physical activity is crucially important for everyone. I am so biased in how much I love exercise and activity. And so that's definitely gonna be something that, you know, you'll see that time and time again, I'm super biased towards exercise. But I think if we can get enough physical activity, that's gonna do so many good things for us. So the current physical activity recommendations for United States, depending on who you look, are about 150 minutes of moderate activity per week, or 75 minutes of vigorous activity. And so, "Moderous" and "Vigorous", what do those terms mean? Essentially, vigorous is when your heart rate is getting up a lot faster, and you're breathing quite heavy, and moderate is where you're, "Okay, I can pretty much sustain this pace for a decent minute of time." So that's kind of how I think about that. There's certain things called METs, metabolic equivalents. You know, it's kind of minutia, not really super important. But in the end of the day, you should be working hard during the week from that perspective. But then the big thing that I wanna take home and tell everyone as well is, when you do that, it's not just cardiovascular. They also recommend two days of resistance training per week. And so for me, I have a more resistance training bias in my philosophy and how I was growing up, how I enjoy it, how I like to train. So that's kind of how that works. But they do recommend in the general guidelines two days as well. So we should be hitting those 150 minutes of moderate or 75 of vigorous, and on top of that, have two days of lifting. And so I think that's like our bare minimum we should shoot for. Like if you're not hitting that, if you don't hit that, like start there. If you're not doing either 150 or lifting, start right there. You know, for me, everyone's gonna be like, "Well, which one, you know, what am I neglecting?" You know, you know, I mean, us lifters will tend to sometimes not wanna do cardio and vice versa for my runner friends. And so you really know which one you're neglecting and kind of move from there based off of, you know, where you think your weaknesses are. But if really, really, if we can get into that minimum baseline, that's like a starting spot. Can you exercise too much? That's a whole nother podcast question we can talk about. But for most intense in purposes, for most people, you probably can't. There's probably some extreme stream examples where you might be able to. But, you know, if you think about it, that's our floor. You know, that baseline, we get that floor there, then anything, you know, above that is gravy. It's gonna be better. And I mean, I don't even have to necessarily talk about the benefits of exercise and what that does. I mean, it's literally limitless between, you know, helping you maintain body mass, helping your cholesterol, your blood pressure, your risk of cancer, your, I mean, literally like all cause mortality, like your chance of dying, literally everything you can think about, exercise helps you with. And so with those two pillars, like food and nutrition, like those are the first two that like, okay, like if you're not doing anything else, like for folks on these two, and a lot of other things will fall into place as well. And it kind of goes hand in hand with our third topic, which is actually getting adequate sleep. I think as a society, we are chronically underslept. I think it kind of comes from the top where you see celebrities or people saying, I don't need four hours of sleep. I'm a superhuman. They're lying, pretty much. Signs will show that most people need seven to nine hours of sleep. And there's very, very, very few people who have the genotype that they can function on like five or less hours. They might say they're doing fine, but how many cups of coffee are they drinking? How many monsters are they crushing? Or just how many areas of their life are not going fantastically? It's essentially, you're gonna have to sleep. Your body needs to get that. And if you don't, it just really impacts so many different things. You know, whether that's immune function, which I don't know if anybody's talked about immune function in the last two and a half years or so, but it's pretty important. And so immune function, your once again, blood pressure, cholesterol, overall mortality. I mean, literally everything that I can say for physical activity and diet can be said for sleep as well. And so really those first three are like, check one, check two, check three. And if one of those three is off, then go back and keep working till you get those because these are like the top three. Or it's like, man, if these are locked in and everything else is gonna be there. So, you know, we'll talk more about sleep and we'll talk about each one of these nine topics individually at different points. But sleep is so important for everyone that we should be kind of at least giving ourselves a chance, you know, if you're not sleeping, you're not giving yourself a chance to recover. You're not giving yourself a chance, you know, to be at your best. So really, you know, nutrition, exercise, sleep. If I just stop right there, we'd probably take care of it, but I wanna go a little deeper just so kind of have some more tangible things to touch on. Number four. So we talked about our first three. Number four is maintaining an appropriate body weight or body composition. I know this is kind of, kind of treading into some sketchy areas here with the internet and whatnot, but I think the data is pretty convincing that you should have a healthy body composition and it's beneficial. You know, when I talk about this, a lot of times people will say, BMI, and they go, but Jordan, BMI is not, doesn't matter. It's not important. And I'm not saying we need to use BMI for everything. I'm not getting that at all. But if you look at BMI and how it was used, it's kind of a overarching tool. You know, we can kind of look at the general population and say, you know, where are they at? What's their threshold? And it does a decent job at that actually. When you have someone who's in like, you know, overweight or obese category from based on BMI for the general public that works decently. Obviously this demographic watching this is probably gonna be a little bit more active. And so that might skew a little bit higher on the BMI with body mass or what have you. That's fine. I just want to say that having a healthy body composition, obviously if you're sitting in a, you know, 25 to 30 is kind of where the overweight is and 30 above is obese. If you're sitting at a 27, 28, but you're ripped out of your mind, that's obviously a different concept, but honestly that's a super, super small set of people. That's just not the general public. And so if you are that person, if you're like, Jordan, BMI doesn't work for me, that's fine. Then we can also add in waist circumference as well. And there's different cutoffs that we'll look for for waist circumference to kind of dictate, hey, are we in a good area? And we can talk about that later. But at the end of the day, it does seem to matter. Obesity does tend to have, you know, impacts on everybody. You know, if you think about it, we used to think that adipose tissue or fat was metabolically inactive, that it just was there. We actually know that it's metabolically active, that it has, you know, it produces hormonal changes. It can lead to different things down the line. And so having and maintaining a healthy body weight is beneficial, not only from decreasing the amount of adverse effects you can get from the tissue itself, but also that we know late on the line, a lot of times increased adipose tissue or poor body composition can start to kind of snowball and lead to other things, to like metabolic syndrome leading down the line. And so I do think it's important. And once again, I kind of put this forth down there because if you take care of those first three, this is probably gonna take care of itself as well. And that's kind of like it is for most of the other things on the list. But I think it's worth mentioning because I do think it's important to at least consider that. And I don't think we should just be, you know, throwing out BMI left and right and saying that's everything. But I think it's kind of important to kind of consider that as we go along. All right, next is one that hopefully not too many y'all are dealing with, but it's don't use any tobacco products. That's our number five thing. If you're smoking, if you're dipping, if you're doing whatever vaping, like you should just stop. And I'm not here to preach or, you know, be on a high horse. There's just lots and lots of really good data that there's pretty much no good benefit to tobacco. That's not necessarily true. There's some links with that and colon cancer and decrease, but that's neither here nor there. That is a esoteric fact, but if you're using tobacco products, you should really stop. And I know that's like, well, Jordan, that's super easy. I'll just stop right now. I know that, man. I get that. It's super challenging. Whether you need pharmacologic therapy or a group support or something, I just encourage you to do it. It's a really challenging thing to deal with, to stop tobacco of any kind. But man, that's like one of the biggest bangs we can get for our buck. Like if you just stop smoking, you stop dipping, you stop vaping, like it is a huge benefit for you. And I know vaping is kind of relatively new. People are like, Jordan, is that safe? Is it not safe? I don't know. The way I think about it is like hot air going in your lungs, probably not good. Like probably not good from any source. Like it's just not a good idea to have. It's gonna damage the lung most likely. And we're starting to see some of that preliminary data come in as well. And so if you think about it, really like getting rid of tobacco, that's a really, really low hanging fruit, easier said than done. I totally recognize that. I get that. But if we can do that, that would be a huge step forward in our health. Moving on, now we're getting into more of the kind of medical stuff, kind of the boring things. But the next one we're gonna talk about is maintaining a normal blood pressure. You know, everyone knows about blood pressure when you go to the doctor, they put the cuff on the arm and you sit there and you just hope it's a good number or you don't even know what the number is. And you're like, okay, cool, looks good to me. But that's actually really, really important 'cause our blood pressure is something that kind of can have some long-term issues. You know, a high blood pressure here or there is nothing really to worry about. You know, what we think of what is these chronic time after time after time, having high blood pressure can lead to some issues down the line. You know, issues with blood pressure can lead to issues with your heart. It can lead to heart attacks, it can lead to strokes, can lead to all sorts of not fun stuff. And so it's really something we wanna take care of. And I'm kind of a minimalist when it comes to tests, you know, in terms of like, oh, we should test this, we should test that, but you should get your blood pressure test. Like pretty much regardless of how old you are, like once a year you should get your blood pressure test just to make sure that it's okay. And then it's not going way, way high up there 'cause it can lead to some issues longer term down the line. But that's kind of a really important thing. And you know, there's different guidelines. You go out in the medical world, there's all these different things. You know, there's different organizations, we have different recommendations. I would say generally, generally if you're watching this, you consider yourself a lifelong athlete. You wanna be active for life, you're healthy, you wanna stay active, you know, shooting for less than 120 over 80 is a general good goal. I think the lower you go, the better, you know, in terms of you can go 107 over 63, that's okay. As long as you're not just passing out and feeling lightheaded or anything like that, you know, but the lower you go, probably better based on the data that I've seen. But at least getting for that 120 over 80, getting the slurred numbers are below 120 in the one teens and the seventies for the diastolic. If you're hitting those numbers, I'm feeling generally pretty good about things, but obviously the lower, the better. And I think your doctor is never gonna be mad if it's like, oh, your blood pressure's getting down there unless you're having symptoms. Obviously you're having symptoms, talk to your doc, hold up, we'll figure it out. But if you feel perfectly fine and you go to the doctor and you're sitting there like 100 over 60, no worries, man, that's awesome. That's great, that's fantastic. So blood pressure is another one that has some big consequences later down the line if we don't take care of it. And so it's another one that we have really good interventions for too. We know that diet and exercise does help, but sometimes we also need pharmacotherapy or some sort of medications. You'll kind of learn my approach behind medicines and whatnot, and I think there's definitely a time and place for that. I know some people will say, you should never use medications. We should only be using lifestyle interventions like sleep, exercise. I mean, like once again, you're preaching the choir. As the reason I said those three things are first, nutrition, exercise, sleep, like that's the foundation of everything. But what if that doesn't work? Like what if we can't get there? What if you're trying your hardest, you're doing hours and hours a week of exercising and eating perfect, and we still can get there. What if you have bad genes? What if your family has high blood pressure and it just kind of comes with the territory? Do we just say, well, sorry, try harder? No, like we use the tools we have at our exposure. And when we have tools that we can use, we should use them. I'm not saying this is the first thing that we should do if you're high blood pressure, if you have it up and say, oh yeah, just take these pills. I think we talked about lifestyle, but man, to not use the tools we have, I think would be doing my patients an injustice. So I am doing that, I will do that. I will talk about medications judiciously. I use them judiciously as well. And I'm never gonna try to just push that on people all the time, I know it's a very hot topic, but it is something that I will prescribe because sometimes, you know, they can be very, very helpful for patients. And I think the day for me, like getting the target value to then lead to the target outcome, like that's the most important thing to me and how we get there, we can work on it together. But I really just wanna have good outcomes. And sometimes that takes, you know, taking medication. We've done six so far. Number seven is gonna be maintaining normal blood sugars. And so maintaining our blood sugar is essentially, what this means is, you know, everyone's talked about diabetes, right? Everyone's heard about diabetes, how it's growing in America, and it is. What essentially that is, is it's a problem with your body being able to regulate blood sugar. And everyone talks about insulin. Insulin is the hormone in your body that kind of brings sugar into the cells. And diabetes has an issue with kind of recognizing insulin and what you call, you get essentially something called insulin resistance, where you're not as sensitive to that insulin. So it takes more and more insulin, again, to get the sugar back into your cells. And so you tend to have higher sugar levels in your blood. The reason that's an issue is these higher sugar, you know, all the higher sugar in the blood can lead up to some accumulations around, in the eyes, the heart, you know, anywhere in your body that has blood vessels will have an issue with it. So the big things we worry about are heart attacks, strokes, can lead to kidney issues too. Like a huge reason for kidney transplant is people who have what we call diabetic nephropathy or kidney damage due to high blood sugars. And so it really is a devastating consequence that lasts years and years down the line. So we wanna be able to find that early, identify it, fix that, so we don't have the long-term sequelae of diabetes. But once again, critically important. A lot of times we find that all these things are linked, high blood pressure, diabetes, and the next one we're gonna talk about cholesterol. A lot of times these are linked together and that fixing them together is kind of the general approach we're going for. We're never gonna just be like in isolation. Like we'll just worry about your sugars today and we won't worry about your blood pressure. We worry about them all together. And so we'll kind of work on it. But getting our blood sugars on point is gonna be helpful, no doubt. Number eight, we're talking about cholesterol. I hinted towards it, getting your cholesterol in your regular range. This is also another one. That's a huge can of worms on the internet. You know, people are probably saying, "Jordan, you're pretty brave for taking this on 'cause here we go." Well, first of all, whatever, I'm not really on social media too much, so that's fine. But second of all, I just think based off of what I've seen, the evidence that I've looked at, I think that keeping an eye on these and understanding these is worthwhile to do. I know there's some people in the camp that LDL particle or LDL doesn't matter at all. And that it can be as high as you want as long as your other things are good, meaning your blood pressure, your sugars. And that is, you know, I've seen that talk around there, but for me, it's just one of those things I'm not really willing to bet on that yet. I'm not willing to say, "Okay, I'm very confident that's the case. And as long as these other things are fine, we can leave this and let it be." For me, it's just one of those things that I think we can have all of the above. I think we can have good control on blood pressure, good control on sugars, and good control on cholesterol. To me, it's like, I think hedging our bets towards improving our LDL and our cholesterol numbers, I think that's worth it to me personally. I think that if we can get all three of those under control, I would do that. If you prioritize something differently, that's okay. And I respect that opinion and I value that. But for me, I just look at it and it seems that the evidence pointing towards the higher the LDL and things like that, that we tend to have more issues. I think that's probably why I lean towards trying to keep in that in our control. And trying to keep within at least the general guidelines that's recommended by the medical communities out there. I think that's a good place to start. We'll dive deeper into lipidology and cholesterol. It's a huge, huge topic, lots and lots of information. And we'll learn more about that. But just generally starting with keeping them under control. If you have a generally good control, that's a good place to start. We might be able to optimize it better. There's some different tests and more specific tests we can do. But at the end of the day, I just don't want you to be running around with an LDL of like 600 and be like, "Oh, it's fine 'cause everything else is fine." For me, I think I'd probably wanna work on getting that down and improving that a little bit. But like I said, this is a big can of worms. Not ready to open the whole can right now, but I think encompassing the whole metabolic syndrome picture, I think it's helpful to control those. And then the last one here, number nine, we are gonna talk about, it's kind of a catchall for everything at the end of the day. It's kind of cheating a little bit, but it kind of falls on the same umbrella. So I want you to consider your mental, social and spiritual wellbeing. So we've kind of talked about all these physical things, like checklist numbers, numbers and lab values and this and that. But at the end of the day, I put this at the end 'cause if all these things are locked in, your diet's great, you're exercising like a madman, all your numbers look great, you're sleeping perfect, awesome, awesome, awesome. But you hate your life and you hate your community. What good is that? Like it doesn't do any good. And so for me, having those first eight things are fantastic and help lower our risk for lots and lots of issues. But like number nine, we also need to consider 'cause what good is it if you're locked in, have a perfect diet, but you're miserable? I think that's really, really important. So I think we're beings that really have lots of benefits from having community, whether that is an academic group, a medical group, a spiritual group, religious group, what have you, I think we benefit from that. And also, as we've seen the past couple of years, we've had a mental health epidemic here going on. And so taking care of your mental health is super, super important. So I think a lot of times having these things locked in can be helpful towards that. But I do wanna recognize that that can be entirely separate issue. I don't wanna be someone who just says, "Hey, you need to exercise harder or eat better and then your mental health will get better." Maybe that's true, but I'm not gonna put that on you saying like, "Oh, you need to work out harder and that's why you're having that." I don't think that's the case. I think we've seen lots and lots of examples of that throughout the years. You probably know someone or you yourself has been affected by that. And so it's a very serious thing. But I just wanna include that, like if we're gonna be ultimately healthy and happy, I think we need to include that and we'll talk more about that. But this is just my general guideline, kind of my general necessary nine of what it's gonna take for you to be healthy, truly healthy. And that being said, there's obviously more to this. This is not all encompassing list, but it kind of catches a big, a wide net kind of, at least to most things that we're gonna talk about. I think if you get these nine things locked in, you're gonna be in really, really good shape. My goal is to be a lifelong athlete. My goal is for you to be lifelong athlete. And so I want you to kind of learn with me and help use these things. And hopefully you've learned something from that. I would say from a takeaway perspective today for a take home thing, if one of these nine things is not where you want it to be, whether your blood pressure is not great or you're not exercising enough or your sleep is garbage, keep going back to this list. Like literally, if you just worry about this list and keep working on it and you get it locked in, you're gonna be so great. I know in social media today and the culture, it's very easy to go to the next sexy thing, whether it's specific supplements or nutrients or this thing or that thing. I mean, those are great, but they're just really not moving the needle much where these are like big needle movers. Like these are a low hanging fruit. If we improve these, each image of one will have a big impact in and of itself. And you start tying those together, it's not gonna be an additive effect. It's gonna have a multiple effect is what it's gonna come down to. So that's what I wanna really just encourage you to, hey, get these locked in and do that. So whether you're watching this or whether you're listening on your favorite podcast app, I really, really can't thank you enough for doing that. It means the world to me. I'm obsessed with YouTube and podcasts as well. So I know how crucial it is and how many options you have out there and so that you're taking time on. I really appreciate that. If you find this helpful, I really appreciate if you dropped a comment, left a review, hit a like or subscribe. Yeah, and just really let to know what kind of information you wanna learn. So I hope this is the first of many and thanks so much for tuning in. Appreciate it. (upbeat music) Disclaimer, this podcast is for entertainment, education and informational purposes only. The topics discussed should not solely be used to diagnose, treat or prevent any condition. The information presented here was created with an evidence-based approach, but please keep in mind that science is always changing. And at the time of listening to this, there may be some new data that makes this information incomplete or inaccurate. Always seek the advice of your personal physician or qualified healthcare provider for questions regarding any medical condition.
