Deno is back by popular demand! Childhood Obesity is on the rise and with it, adult obesity and the healthcare crisis. Deno is pack to cover a very sensitive topic and share some of his family’s best practices that they’re currently using to make sure the Mickle family isn’t part of that statistic.

This week’s podcast is with Strongman, Powerlifting and Fitness Theory with strength athlete and guru Richard Saad of @saadstrengthYou got questions about strength training? 99% sure we talked about it in this podcast!But if by some form or sorcery we didn’t answer your question, post it in the comment section and we’ll talk about it in 2 weeks at our next session! #STRONGEREVERYDAY!! And just to make SURE this post gets a ton of views…sorry Richard, i found your bodybuilding pictures 😉 You’re welcome America (or at least Charleston and a decent portion of Texas)

full videocast In the Spirit of New Years, myself and y’alls second favorite co-host, Tom Schachte decided to do some spirited talk about gym pet peeves and what you can expect if you’re about to become a new inhabitant of the gym wilderness! After all the jokes, we dive into a little bit of the current research on your actual protein needs and then what our new years resolutions are and the tricks we’re using to make them stick! Happy Taco Tuesday (or lettuce taco wraps if you’re paleo/keto)! Post-protein workout shakes and protein synthesis articles: https://www.google.com/search?q=protein+post+workout+pubmed+same+muscle+synthesis&rlz=1C5CHFA_enUS853US853&oq=protein+post+workout+pubmed+same+muscle+synthesis&aqs=chrome..69i57.27852j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3879660/

In the spirit of New years, I interviewed @fitculturebydeno on the topic of ‘Finding Your Why’. Deno is a local Exemplar Fitness personal trainer and retired military professional who believes that we all need to find our own personal why to create profound meaningful changes in our life. If we want to form a new habit, we better have a clear, personal and meaningful ‘why’. Click the link above to listen to the full videocast or the file below to listen to the full podcast.

Judy was in a rough spot with her health when she reached out to me overwhelmed by her lack of recovery from hip surgery, her current health conditions, chronic pain, constant daily pills to take and her multiple healthcare visits every week. She wasn’t sure that things were going to be able to turnaround for her, but her friend Jan had convinced her that it was worth a shot! Judy and I started slow with the longest initial consult i’ve ever done and laid out each condition, when they began, each medication and when each symptom started along with any life changes that happened around that time. Then we got into the nitty -gritty with her daily diet, sleep habits, stress levels, activity level and bowel habits (yes…they’re important). I then went home and did a diet analysis of her current diet and created a new nutrition template for Judy to follow and educated her on how to apply it. That next week we started working out together 2 x a week unsure as to what we could do considering she could barely lift her right leg off the ground and would shuffle some as she walked. The only cardio she could get her leg into at the time was the bike and she needed to lift it with her other leg.We did her cardio at the beginning so we could warm up and chat about her sleep, stress, nutrition and how she was feeling overall. As weeks turned into months, her pain lessened and then it was the magic 9 months after her hip surgery that we regained the ability to lift her leg. This was quickly followed by the ability to do full lunges, full squats, weighted squats, and then the ability to get on and off the ground. We didn’t do anything magical. All we did was begin to exercise regularly, eat diet of mostly plants, some nuts and seeds, enough protein and not too much. A sedentary lifestyle is a disease state all on it’s own. If you don’t use it, you lose it. It’s the case with most of the human body: skeletal muscle, bone density, the adaptive immune system, and the digestive system. When you restore movement and motion, you can start to reverse the disease processes that are a result of inactivity. And any other additional lifestyle changes you make at that point are just amplifiers: cleaning up the diet, increasing sleep quality, decreasing unneeded medications, and lowering life stresses. Anyways, be inspired my friends! And my hope is that you all become your own health advocate and take an active role in working with your medical professionals to enhance your passion for and quality of life. me and Judy goofing around they grow up so fast 😉

Harvard Business Review: https://hbr.org/2008/05/overcoming-imposter-syndrome According to Harvard Business Review, ‘Imposter syndrome can be defined as a collection of feelings of inadequacy that persist despite evident success. ‘Imposters‘ suffer from chronic self-doubt and a sense of intellectual fraudulence that override any feelings of success or external proof of their competence. They seem unable to internalize their accomplishments; however successful they are in their field. High achieving, highly successful people often suffer, so imposter syndrome doesn’t equate with low self-esteem or a lack of self-confidence. In fact, some researchers have linked it with perfectionism, especially in women and among academics.’ Psychologist Pauline Rose Clance was the first to study this phenomenon in her work as a therapist to undergraduate students. She found many of her students has high grades but persistent feelings that they were unworthy of being at the university or even that their admission to the university was an error. Einstein has been said to have had imposter syndrome, and felt undeserving of all the attention his ideas and experiments got. It’s not a disease or abnormality, it’s universal across gender (though more common in women), races and ages. 70% of people have these feelings and periods in life: 4 Traits of imposter syndrome: * Fear of Failure* Perfectionism* Anxiety* Persistent self-doubt Harvard Business Review: Ted Talks on Imposter Syndrome: So what can you do to start to overcome Imposter Syndrome? • Recognize imposter syndrome and name it. Awareness is the first step to change, this takes the feelings out of your limbic center and allows you to logically think through them and rewrite those neural networks over time. • Every failure is a learning opportunity– you can reframe, learn and grow from all of your ‘failures’ • Be kind to yourself– everyone makes mistakes because we’re all human. Love yourself and forgive yourself! BEST WAY TO BANISH IMPOSTER SYNDROME: -talk about it

Jessica Wong…is to blame for this race. She completed her DOUBLE trifecta at this race and convinced me to do it with her. There were zero cute pictures taken at this race or during this race…or anytime within 6 hours after this race because…well you’ll hear in the podcast ;). Below is the podcast with the full details on how treacherous the race conditions and this course were. A cold front came in DURING the race and the temperature dropped 8-12 degrees. The clay trails with steep inclines and declines had many hills that people slid down on their butts because there was no way to stay on your feet. Even the flats were incredibly slippery just from the type of dirt and sediment on the trails… . I guarantee that no one made it out of that course on their feet. Anyone who competed and finished should be extremely proud of their psychological grit as well as their physical fitness! At the finish line, I saw the medical tent filled with hypothermic racers and sprained ankles… .Well among them later on was Jessica. This race I finished 13th overall elite female but honestly I’m most proud of just being the type of person that can endure that type of race with the freezing, persistent rain and the treacherous, slippery trails for over 15 miles and not quit. . Congratulations to all who raced and persevered through the over 15 character-building miles of trails and obstacles. To hear the nitty gritty details of the full and grueling adventure hit play below 😉

Jan and i met at an Oblique Magazine event at CycleBar Mount Pleasant …naturally! Because you really don’t meet ‘normal’ people at these type of events! it’s more for the ‘on a mission’, biohacker, health obsessed type-a person;). Anyways, we immediately hit it off being both Registered medical professionals (R.N. and R.D.) that are pushing to not only stay current on the medical research and guidelines, but to also understand how to apply supplemental adjunct therapies. We’re both obsessed with how lifestyle changes in nutrition, sleep quality, sleep hygiene, mindfulness training, stress-reduction therapies and herbal therapies can help people heal themselves quickly and sustainably. During this podcast Jan and I cover gut health, how our brain affects our gut and how our gut can affect our brain, a ‘food first’ approach to diet, the need for a preventative approach to our current healthcare system, and what the trademarks of a ‘healthy diet’ are. You can find Jan Park on instagram @health_yourself_byjp

This was the book i picked up at the airport before heading off on my anniversary trip to the Grand Canyon and Zion, and i can’t express how grateful i am to have chosen it! Tom Schachte is back on the podcast to help us dive deep into this book and what we have to gain from being deliberate about what is worthy of us giving our fucks to, how so save our fucks for the things that really matter and how to not lose our shit in traffic and when the last squat rack just got taken. How to seamlessly navigate the first world that we live in order to be present, passionately focused and able to dedicate ourself to the things that really deserve our fucks. This is one of my favorite podcasts yet.