Ep. 82: Optimal Performance with Greg Wells, Ph.D.
Listen, Rate & Subscribe
Apple Podcasts // Spotify // Google Podcasts // Stitcher // Amazon Music
What’s the difference between getting through the day and performing at your absolute best? A whole lot, argues Dr. Greg Wells—and he wants to help you get there. Dr. Wells is a physiologist, senior scientist at SickKids hospital and the president of Wells Performance. He takes the latest training techniques from elite athletics and applies them to corporate executives, to help CEOs and management teams perform better in their jobs. His latest book is Rest, Refocus, Recharge: A Guide for Optimizing Your Life. Dr. Wells argues that we need to move past non-stop “hustle culture” and toward a more holistic focus that acknowledges the importance of recovery to long-term optimal performance. On this week’s episode, Dr. Wells joins host and Medcan CEO Shaun Francis to discuss the benefits of recovery, why we all need to be thinking about how to sleep better and how to optimize our lives for the best results.
LINKS
You can find Dr. Wells online at his website, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn.
Learn more about his latest book Rest, Refocus, Recharge here.
Check out Dr. Wells’ blog post summarizing how to achieve optimal performance in life and sport. You can also get more similar content by signing up for his newsletter here.
Dr. Wells has also appeared on several podcasts, and has spoken at UofT’s Tedx event.
INSIGHTS
The way we approach performance in sports has shifted dramatically over the past few decades. In the ‘80s and ‘90s, the training philosophy was to train as much as possible, regardless of injuries or your mental health. Olympic-level swimmers would spend hours and hours per day in the pool. According to Dr. Wells, this started to change in the late ‘90s and early 2000s. Now, we see more of a focus on intensity training: athletes will train in their sport at a very high level for only a few hours a day, and the rest of their time is focused on other activities, such as recovery and nutrition. The shift from quantity of training to quality of training is resulting in better performance and, often, longer careers. Dr. Wells observes that he’s seeing a similar shift happen in the business world. “Regeneration is becoming a lot more accepted,” he says. “We’re moving out of this hustle culture into what is more of a performance-based culture, which is super important, because along with higher performance comes much better mental, physical, emotional and spiritual health.” [03:44]
Getting a good night’s sleep is one of the most important things we can do to achieve optimal performance, Dr. Wells says. Luckily, it’s easier than ever to track our resting cycles and work on proper sleep hygiene thanks to the development of wearable tech, like Fitbits and Apple Watches. But with great tech comes great responsibility. We don’t want these devices to become a clutch, or a potential trigger for anxiety. “We’ve got to build a balance... It’s the idea of intention versus compulsion,” says Dr. Wells. “If you’re intentionally using wearable technology to get data so that you can make decisions, that’s fantastic. If you’re compulsively looking at your data and it’s actually making things worse, then you need to throw it all away.” [12:41]
At the same time, we have to be careful not to become dependent on other sleep aids, like medication, to help us get some shut eye. Sleep medication can and should be used temporarily in some instances. “But use them as a bridge to get better sleep habits,” says Dr. Wells, explaining that long-term consistent use of medication to get people to sleep has been associated with shorter lifespans. Attempt other techniques, like exhausting yourself during the day with exercise, blackout blinds and journaling, to see what else you can do to help improve your sleep. [15:06]
Dr. Wells talks about the need to defend the last hour of sleep. “That’s creating a digital sunset,” he explains. “You don’t want to have the same level of activation before you fall asleep. You want to use the last hour of your day before you fall asleep to downshift, slow down, relax, decompress, reflect, deconstruct, build relationships and take care of ourselves.” He recommends following the 20-20-20 pattern—basically finding three calming, mindful activities you can do for 20 minutes each during the hour before you go to bed. [19:03]
Of course, nutrition is also a key part of optimal performance. Intermittent fasting is a hot topic of discussion at the moment, as it seems to help the digestive system go through its own restorative process. But, according to Dr. Wells, you don’t have to do the typical 16-hour fast — intermittent fasting for 12 hours a day achieves about 80 percent of the same benefits, including boosting the body’s ability to repair and regenerate and a reduction in inflammatory markers. “Basically, after dinner, no more snacking is the easiest way to think about it.” [20:49]
How to Optimize Your Life with Greg Wells, PhD final web transcript
Christopher Shulgan: Welcome to episode 82 of Eat Move Think. I'm executive producer Christopher Shulgan. Optimal performance. It's something that we expect in the world of sport and in business. Yet the techniques that athletes and professionals use to achieve optimal performance are profoundly different. Which brings us to Dr. Greg Wells. He's the president of Wells Performance—a consulting company that takes the latest high-performance techniques from elite athletics and applies them to the professional world, to help the rest of us achieve optimal performance. Wells argues that if you approach your career the way an athlete trains for an important race, you're going to think smarter, react faster and perform better overall.
[00:00:51.11]
Christopher Shulgan: In addition to running his consulting company, Wells is a senior scientist at SickKids, and the author of Rest, Refocus, Recharge: A Guide for Optimizing Your Life, in which he argues that recovery is the most important tool in our arsenal to keep us feeling our best. He just finished a series in his weekly newsletter that summarizes the latest evidence from the science of sleep, nutrition, recovery and exercise.
[00:01:15.22]
Christopher Shulgan: So this week, Dr. Wells joins host and Medcan CEO Shaun Francis to discuss what we all can learn from elite athletes to achieve optimal performance. Here's their conversation.
[00:01:30.16]
Shaun Francis: Hi, I'm Shaun Francis CEO here at Medcan. Today, I'm really delighted to have with me Dr. Greg Wells, who's a performance physiologist who consults with high-performance athletes to help them achieve optimal results. Why don't we just kick off? Like, how did you get into this whole business of optimization? I know you're a professor of kinesiology by training, but you've really popularized high performance. Maybe you can, for our listeners, give us a bit of the history of how you arrived here.
[00:01:57.26]
Greg Wells: Yeah, sure. The Coles Notes of life. Thanks, Shaun, I really appreciate having the chance to be on your show, and also just to connect and chat. This pandemic's given me a chance sort of reflect on the journey of getting to where I am today, which basically started when I was a competitive swimmer growing up. Broke my neck when I was 15, went through neurosurgery, rehab, back into swimming sort of up to high national, very, very, very, very low international level. All my friends made the Olympics—I didn't. And then doing a kinesiology degree, which then led to doing a Master's and PhD in exercise science. That led to doing a postdoc at SickKids and another postdoc in respiratorymedicine and then a postdoc in biomedical engineering at Toronto General. And then through all of that time through grad school, was also consulting with the Canadian Olympic team. And then also commentated three Olympics for CTV.
[00:02:47.14]
Greg Wells: And I think the popularization happened when I did a series for CTV in 2010 and 2012 at the Olympics called Superbodies, which showed the athletes doing their sports, but then also used CGI to take everyone inside the body to show them what was really happening to the body. And that sort of exploded things. But the vast majority of my work right now is writing books and public speaking, and running a corporate human performance consulting company, which during this pandemic has actually gone totally global, which is another sort of wild ride and experience. So it's been it's been a wild time, and super grateful to have the life that I've had.
[00:03:24.02]
Shaun Francis: Given that history, I mean, it's super interesting how you got into this. And obviously, you have the academic background, but you've also been writing about it and working real time in a clinical setting in with, I'm sure, execs and athletes. How has the thinking on performance evolved over your career? Have there been new insights that have come to the forefront?
[00:03:45.18]
Greg Wells: Yeah, sure. I think the biggest fundamental shift that's happened in sports, which I think we're beginning to enter into now in business more broadly, is that when I was an athlete, and then as a coach in the late '80s, and the '90s, the philosophy around sports and high-performance sports was just do more. Volume, right? Like, whoever trained the most made the Olympic team. And if you got injured too bad. If you got depressed, whatever, like, there was just simply nothing other than volume of training. Maybe at the swim meet itself, you might get a massage, but that was it. And nutrition was basically carb loading. That was the best that we had at the time. Over the late '90s and the 2000s, and then over the 2010s, we've seen a total shift in sport from that high volume training approach to a quality training approach where we do not so much volume focus, but intensity focus, where we ask athletes to perform at a world-class level in practice as often as possible, and then intersperse that with a whole lot of recovery and regeneration.
[00:04:53.22]
Greg Wells: So whereas before, the majority of the training was probably done between 65 and 80 percent of their race pace performance, now it's sort of 35 to 50 percent alternated with between 90 and 115 percent of their race pace performance. And funny enough, even though the intensity is so much higher, because the volume's lower, there's fewer injuries, I think much less drain upon an athlete's mental health.Athletes are being supported now with holistic nutrition that is very different from the sports nutrition that we grew up with. It's as organic as we can afford, it's more and more plant based, it's targeted supplementation. So we've really learned an enormous amount. We're now focusing in on athletes sleeping well, getting regular massages, using hot-cold contrast, compression therapy. So there's all sorts of modalities that athletes can use to keep themselves healthy as they train. And we've seen this shift from high volume to higher performance, mental health's better. And instead of just breaking world records once every four years at the Olympics, or maybe once every two years, alternating World Championships and the Olympics, because of the X Games circuit, because of the World Cup circuits that now exist, athletes are breaking records multiple times a year.
[00:06:11.02]
Greg Wells: And the careers are longer. Now back when I was growing up, a long career was 22 years old. We are now seeing athletes regularly make the Olympics into their third, fourth, maybe even sometimes fifth or more Olympic games at 30 years of age, 40 years of age. Now that shift towards higher performance and a lot more recovery and regeneration is also now I think becoming a lotmore accepted in business. We're moving out of this hustle culture and into what I what I think is a more performance-based culture, which I think is super important, because along with that higher performance-based culture comes, I think, much better mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual health. So yeah, that's the big trend that I've observed over my entire career, up to this point.
[00:06:57.17]
Shaun Francis: You know, I know business-wise, people would tout how they didn't need to sleep, and they could just simply work more, right? And more was better. And I think we've certainly been learning that that probably had a negative effect mentally and on our overall performance. Maybe we are seeing the same philosophies take hold in professional life.
[00:07:19.06]
Greg Wells: I certainly hope so. And I think that if you look at some of the data that Harvard has published in HBR—Harvard Business Review—around the average length of time that a CEO is CEO at a Fortune 100 company, the length of time that those people are performing in those roles is getting a little bit longer. And so the investments made to bring people up to those leadership levels and then function at a high level in those leadership roles, and hopefully having a positive impact on the organization and the people in those organizations. So we are seeing a fundamental shift towards this appreciation of health and well being, and the need and want to be healthy and to perform at a high level, and not just simply burn the candle at both ends and show how tough we are by drinking and then getting up the next morning to try to work.
[00:08:13.15]
Shaun Francis: Going back to your athlete example, when you talk, you know, it was historically more was better, what was your average athlete—I mean, how much of their day was physically training historically versus recovery to where they might be today?
[00:08:28.15]
Greg Wells: Yeah, that's a great question. I've never been asked that before. So I would say that historically, let's say 20-30 years ago, an athlete would train somewhere in the order of anywhere from three to six hours a day. So a track and field athlete would go out and they would do work on the track, and then they would go hit the gym and lift weights, and then repeat. Probably do that twice a day, and repeat for as long as long as possible. The group that when I was working with them, I think trained more than anyone else I've ever seen was synchronized swimming. They were eight to 10 hours a day between ballet, between choreography, between water work, between weights. It was literally a full-time job, literally training for that particular sport. And I would say at that point in time, almost all of it was physically-demanding training. During the course of the actual training cycles, you know, let's call it anywhere outside of three weeks before the competition when they were tapering, you might get one or two massages a year, you might stretch a little bit before practice. Like, there was very, very little deliberate recovery and regeneration.
[00:09:34.26]
Greg Wells: Whereas right now, if we look at, for example, Ben Titley's group, which is the High Performance Centre in Toronto for swimming that generated a number of medals: gold, silver, bronze relays, a number of different individuals, Penny Oleksiak, Margaret MacNeil, that crew, they will train for probably on any given day, maximum three hours, maybe two hours in the pool at the absolute outside. But then there's also a lot of activation work on the deck. So probably not necessarily sort of strength training, but mobility work, functional movement range, range of motion type work. The weight training that they do, the strength training that they do will be very specifically targeted to their event. They go a lot faster. So the number of metres that they swim, it will be maybe half of what we would see previously, maybe even 30 percent of what we would see previously, but much, much faster. There's a lot of focus dedicated to the goal of winning the Olympics, it's just different than mindlessly slogging up and down the pool at 65 percent. It's a very, very different world.
[00:10:44.04]
Shaun Francis: And how does sleep factor into that, for the athlete?
[00:10:47.13]
Greg Wells: Sleep has become probably the number one foundation for athletes in training. I also think it's now become such an incredibly important part for people in business, too. I've travelled the world speaking at conferences, and everywhere I go, all the industries that I speak to: aviation, banking, insurance, pharma, whatever it happens to be, when I say, "How many people are tired today?" almost the entire audience will put up their hand. And when I do any CEO coaching, we always begin with sleep, because if you're not sleeping well your chances of eating wellare zero. We know that when we sleep well we control leptin and ghrelin, the hormones that regulate your appetite and satiety. So sleep is foundational. We know that when we sleep well we release growth hormone. Growth hormone repairs and regenerates all the tissues inside the body. We know that people who do not sleep as much are at an increased risk for depression. We also know that sleep is related to cancer and cardiovascular disease and Alzheimer's. So not only for athletes, but for all business people sleep, I really do see it as being something that is of the highest priority for everybody. And the really cool thing, and what I think has made a massive difference for the high performer community, is now we all have access to sleep tracking through wearable technology, Fitbit, WHOOP, our app that we created called VIIVIO, which lives on Apple Watch. There's so many different ways for us to track our sleep at, let's call it 60 to 80 percent accuracy of a sleep lab. I think that now that we can all get our own sleep data almost every single day has really empowered people to be able to make changes and see whether or not it's making a difference for them.
[00:12:26.01]
Shaun Francis: Let's stick with sleep for the moment, and you talked about a wearable. I've tried a few of them. Can they create more anxiety, where you're like, "Oh my God, I thought I had a good night's sleep, and then I looked at my Oura Ring read out, and it looks like it was terrible."
[00:12:42.15]
Greg Wells: When it comes to wearable technology, and let's call it exercise, sleep, stress, whatever it happens to be, let's look at it in terms of validity and reliability. So validity. Is it actually measuring what we think that it's measuring? If you put on your Oura Ring, if you put on your Apple Watch, and measure sleep using VIIVIO, and then go into a sleep lab and get a sleep study done, what's the relationship there? It's clearly not as accurate as lab-quality data, but it's also free, relatively speaking, compared to a lab testing. And you can do it every single day, rather than having to book the lab study and wait for it and get it done in very strange conditions. So there's that to sort of balance out. When it comes to reliability which is, if you use the same device using the same technology on repeated days in the same individual, it appears that it's very, very high. So if you're using Oura Ring to track you repeatedly over time and you make changes, Oura will detect those changes relatively accurately.
[00:13:44.25]
Greg Wells: Now the second thing you mentioned is, does measuring yourself actually increase the anxiety around all of it? And that's obviously for sure it can be. I have had people say to me, "Yeah, you know what? I thought I had a good sleep, but I looked at my Ouradata, and it's awful. So I must have slept badly." Even though they feel good. And ultimately, it's you are using yourself as your own laboratory. The perfect test for sleep really is: 30 minutes after you wake up, do you feel good? Are you clear? Are you sharp? Are you focused? Are you energized? Or are you searching for your fourth cup of coffee, right? So that is probably actually one of the best ways you can determine whether or not you are sleeping well.
[00:14:21.08]
Greg Wells: So we've got to build that balance between not overwhelming ourselves with technology. Actually, here's the idea: intention versus compulsion. If you're intentionally using technology, wearable tech, to get some data so that you can make some decisions, that's fantastic. If you're compulsively looking at your data, your wearable tech, and it's actually making things worse, then you need to throw it all away and just be like, "How do I feel?" And you're going to get most of the answer from that simple question.
[00:14:49.00]
Shaun Francis: Yeah, that's a good insight, because I've seen the gamut of people who have no idea and probably have terrible sleep. And then people who are obsessed by it maybe at the expense of their sleep.
[00:14:59.19]
Greg Wells: A hundred percent.
[00:15:00.19]
Shaun Francis: What's your view of sleeping aids, from the medicated to the various over the counter aids that you can get?
[00:15:07.12]
Greg Wells: So I'm a PhD physiologist, not an MD, just to be super clear about that. But when I wrote The Ripple Effect, and we wrote the sleep chapter in The Ripple Effect, I looked at all of the research, and some of that research was very clear on the use of sleep meds, so I'll quote that research for the purposes of this answer. And it's very clear that consistent use of medication to get people to sleep results in an increased risk for all cause mortality. So it appears to shorten lifespan. Of course, if your doctor recommends you get on some sleep medication because you're going through cancer treatment, or you're going through a divorce and you're not sleeping at all, by all means do it. But let's use it as a bridge to get to better sleep habits, better sleep habits that we can build, you know, as we use sleep aids to navigate these difficult times in our lives. The sleep hygiene we recommend [are] blackout blinds. Keep your room pitch black. Cover up the alarm clock light so that there's no light in the room whatsoever, because any light going through the eyeball will decrease the amount of melatonin that is released, and melatonin is the hormone that regulates our sleep-wake cycles.
[00:16:16.00]
Greg Wells: Another tactic that we can use to get away from the sleep meds and to sleep better is not using our technology for an hour before we fall asleep at night. If you're looking at a screen, if you're looking at a television, then you are pumping your brain full of electricity, which makes it very difficult for the pineal gland to release melatonin. Therefore, it's hard for you to fall asleep quickly and deeply and stay asleep. We also really ask people to calm down when it comes to your activation level. As we approach sleep, we want to consider almost like a landing of an airplane, right? You're coming down out of the sky, you're landing, you're taxiing back to the terminal, you're unloading all the baggage, you're resting. Maybe you're taking a hot bath, maybe taking a cool shower to decrease your body temperature just a touch to trigger the release of melatonin. Maybe we're doing some meditation to separate ourselves from the day. Maybe we're doing some gratitude journaling just to program the brain with positivity.
[00:17:12.08]
Shaun Francis: I know you've just talked about these different stages of sleep. I know that I'll wake up occasionally during the night. Does that tie in with these different stages? And is that a bad thing? Or is it an indifferent thing?
[00:17:24.19]
Greg Wells: That's a really interesting insight. I think most of us wake up a few times a night. It's very natural to wake up three to five times a night. We have five different stages of sleep. There's REM and stage 1, 2, 3, 4. REM is when you dream. Stage one and stage two is generally considered to be light sleep; stage three and four is deep sleep. Stage three, four deep sleep is when the neurons contract, when the glial lymphatic system becomes active, and cerebral spinal fluid washes throughout the brain to clean out waste products. That typically happens on the first two sleep cycles of the night. Sleep cycles are about 90 minutes long, so the first three hours is deep sleep when the brain is washing itself out. That's also when new neural connections are made inside the brain to encode memories from the day.
[00:18:07.21]
Greg Wells: So the first three hours is super important for brain regeneration, but also encoding of memories. Then in the second half of sleep, we spend more time in REM and stage one and stage two. That's the lighter sleep when we work on creativity, problem solving and dreaming, which is how the brain sort of allocates the information from the day and decides what gets saved and what gets dumped. And so if we have five complete sleep cycles, which is optimal to get us to seven and a half hours, roughly every 90 minutes, you're probably going to wake up, roll over. And if you fall back asleep within five minutes, that's totally cool and normal and fine. If you're waking up and your eyes are wide and you're staring at the ceiling and you can't fall back asleep again, that's when we need to start working on meditation or progressive relaxation, other tactics to help you to fall asleep quickly.
[00:18:58.11]
Shaun Francis: You talk about in your book about defending the last hour. What does that mean?
[00:19:03.20]
Greg Wells: So that's creating a digital sunset. So we want to unwind. As much as we want to go during the day, let's say you're doing a keynote, let's say you're doing a speech, doing a podcast interview, you want to be sharp, focused, energized, happy, delivering whatever it is that you do to serve the world. And once that's over, you need to recover and to regenerate. So we don't want to have that same level of activation right before you're trying to fall asleep, right? So we want to use that last hour of the day—so let's say it's between 9:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m., to downshift, to slow down, to relax, to decompress, to reflect, deconstruct, to talk, to build relationships and to take care of ourselves.
[00:19:47.04]
Greg Wells: The 20-20-20 pattern is kind of interesting. So if you have an hour—that's 60 minutes—break it into three times 20 minutes, what are the three things that you could do for about 20 minutes each in the last hour before you fall asleep to make sure you fall asleep quickly, deeply and stay asleep? Is it taking a warm bath with a candle going? Is it doing a little light 20 minutes of yoga and stretching? There's so many different things we can do that are not related to watching the news, binge-watching Netflix, going through your email, doom scrolling through social, right? So we're just defending that last hour, allocating that last hour to restorative-type downshifting activities, maybe three of them roughly 20 minutes each. And if we get into the habit of doing that consistently over time, it's an absolute game changer when it comes to us consistently getting a good sleep, which then opens up the possibility of crushing it during the course of the day.
[00:20:45.01]
Shaun Francis: And how long before that hour starts do you have dinner?
[00:20:50.10]
Greg Wells: Yeah, it's interesting, you know, with all of this great new information that's coming out now about intermittent fasting and giving the digestive system a break and separating eating from the moment when we fall asleep, there's some really cool new research all about that. I think that finishing eating a couple of hours before you fall asleep to ensure that the food's out of your stomach and deep into your digestive tract, and that we're beginning the restorative processes inside the digestive system makes a lot of sense to me. I think you can get 80 percent of the benefits of intermittent fasting by basically fasting for 12 hours a day. If we can get to that 12 and 12 pattern, according to the research you get about 80 to 90 percent of the benefits of intermittent fasting, which include increased autophagy—the body's ability to repair and regenerate itself. Increased BDNF—brain-derived neurotrophic factor—which stimulates the growth of new neurons inside the brain. Decreased CRP and IL-6, which are inflammatory markers inside the body. And so that 12 and 12 pattern is what we can achieve if we just stop eating a little bit earlier. Basically, after dinner, no more snacking is the easiest way to think aboutthat. And if you can get to that 12 and 12, eat within 12 hours and don't eat within 12 hours, that's been shown to produce a 30 to 50 percent reduction in inflammatory markers over time, which persists for months after you stop that pattern. So that research was done on people fasting for Ramadan.
[00:22:13.28]
Shaun Francis: When do you exercise?
[00:22:15.14]
Greg Wells: Prior to the pandemic, early in the morning. I was getting it all done before my kids got up at 7:30, because as soon as my kids get up, I lose all control, right? And they were younger at the time. They were only three and nine. Funnily enough, during the pandemic I've shifted to the afternoon. I've been exercising between 2:00 and 4:00 p.m., which according to circadian rhythms is probably better because we do know that there's an increased body temperature in the afternoon, and there's some hormones around testosterone and things that occur—and the cortisol, which occur in the afternoon, which makes the afternoon a good time to exercise.
[00:22:47.22]
Greg Wells: There's benefits of exercising at different times of the day. In the morning, we know that it increases metabolic rate, which is great if you're trying to lose percent body fat. We also know that morning workouts increase BDNF—brain-derived neurotrophic factor—which stimulates the growth of new neurons inside the brain. So it's awesome for brain function. The lunchtime workout increases body temperature, prevents the release of melatonin which stops, in many cases, that afternoon crash. So we call that the second wind workout which gives you your afternoons back. And the evening workouts are amazing for disippaiting stress hormones: cortisol, adrenaline. So if you've had a rough day then the evening workout is fantastic. The realanswer for all the people listening is that whatever time of day you can exercise consistently is probably the best time of day for you.
[00:23:30.27]
Shaun Francis: And how long do you work out?
[00:23:32.17]
Greg Wells: I have discovered over this pandemic that my mental health, depression, anxiety, depends upon me working out a lot. And I think about it growing up, and I was a competitive swimmer. I've always exercised hours a day. And it doesn't matter what it is: walk, run, jog, swim, bike, paddle. Doesn't matter. I basically took all of my commuting time, two hours a day, and allocated it to sports. The research is, I think, quite clear that humans—adults—need approximately six hours a week, ideally one hour a day. And if we can move our bodies for one hour a day, and I don't think it really matters what you do, so I think that 45 minutes to an hour is the best for physical health and mental health.
[00:24:19.27]
Shaun Francis: If you are working out, if you're getting that hour a day, what is the best form of exercise for longevity?
[00:24:26.29]
Greg Wells: If we think about it, we can break it into health span and lifespan. So lifespan is how long you live, health span is how long you live without having a chronic disease. And so we want a combination of lifespan—let's live a long time—and health span—let's live a long time without chronic illness. The typical North American will live 82 years, but the last 12 years is a long, slow decline as chronic illnesses set in and, you know, we don't want that.I want 90 great years, one bad day. That's the perfect sort of scenario, right? Longevity and health span, lifespan and health span. And we know that when we do cardio-type exercise: walk, run jog, swim, bike, paddle, endurance aerobic type stuff, that that increases the production of a molecule inside the body called AMP kinase, which lengthens lifespan.
[00:25:19.29]
Greg Wells: We know that when we do strength training, so anything sort of that stresses the muscles, that's gardening, housework, lifting weights, yoga, that increases the production of a different molecule that extends health span—how long you live without a chronic disease. And so we want that combination of cardio and weights so that you get the lifespan and you get the health span all at the same time. And that variation is the way, I think, to accomplish it. I also think there's some unique benefits of stretching when it comes to nervous system regulation, and spending more time in parasympathetic rest-recover dominance than sympathetic stress activation. So I think stretching is super important for that just as well as our joints and muscles become less pliable over time. And I think it helps us to keep healthy over a long period of time. And I also think there's some unique benefits to anaerobic exercise—exercise that produces lactic acid.
[00:26:17.05]
Shaun Francis: And where does recovery fit in for the average person?
[00:26:20.28]
Greg Wells: Recovery fits in for the average person when we consider general adaptation energy. So consider that we all have a certain amount of energy that goes towards fuelling everything that we do. And that energy is used up through our workouts, it's used up through our jobs, it's used up through our relationships, it's used up through managing our homes. And at the end of the day, we've got to fill that bucket back up, we've got to replenish our energy. That replenishment comes through sleep, comes through nutrition, comes through saunas. It comes through vacations, comes through friends and family. And so we want to have a balance there.
[00:27:02.06]
Greg Wells: So we need to be sensitive and aware that our total life stress determines how we can spend our energy. And as a type A personality that's, you know, running a lab at SickKids and building a business and public speaking around the world, and I've got a family and I'm trying to do sports, this is not easy. But I've become a lot more—I've given myself a lot more grace over the last few years, and a lot more leeway to say like, "You know what? I'm tired. I'm not doing that interval training set today, I'm backing off on Zwift, and I'm just gonna spin my legs because I am smoked." And the more that I've done that, you know, I feel so much better, so much healthier, so much happier—probably not as fit as I could be, but the overall balance and accomplishment in all areas of life are a little bit better.
[00:27:46.23]
Shaun Francis: In the field you're in, and there's probably another book in the offing, what are you most excited about in where the field is going?
[00:27:54.08]
Greg Wells: I think I am most excited about the fact that we are now collectively at a point where we—we, humanity—can reach our potential. The news would probably not convince you of this, but globally if we look at it, poverty is at the lowest level, education is more accessible than it's ever been. Hunger is at its lowest level, child mortality is at its lowest level. All of the data shows us that this is the greatest ever—by far, the greatest ever time to be alive. We are dealing with COVID-19, but we're not dealing with the Black Death in Europe in 1300. And so I think that there are so many more humans now that can reach their potential, whatever that happens to be, wherever they happen to be. And that just makes me so excited. And it's not that we're without our challenges. We certainly have a lot of challenges to overcome, but I've never been more hopeful. And I think the data backs that up. So I'm looking forward to the next 10 years, even though we're in the middle of a global pandemic right at the moment.
[00:29:03.05]
Shaun Francis: Exactly. Let's hope it ends. Well, that's well put, Greg, and I appreciate that and appreciate your time today. Lots of great information here. And it's always great having the conversation with somebody who has such a passion for it and practices every day. So thank you for that. Once again, I'm Shaun Francis, CEO of Medcan, with Dr. Greg Wells. Look out for his new book, Rest, Refocus, Recharge: A Guide for Optimizing Your Life. Follow him on Instagram and Twitter@drgregwells. Thanks again everyone for listening.
[00:29:31.28]
Greg Wells: Really appreciate the opportunity.
[00:29:36.00]
Christopher Shulgan: That was Dr. Greg Wells, performance physiologist, president of Wells Performance and the author of Rest, Refocus, Rechargein conversation with Medcan CEO Shaun Francis. We'll post a link to Dr. Wells' book and more of his work—as well as a full episode transcript at EatMoveThinkpodcast.com.
[00:29:54.11]
Christopher Shulgan: Eat Move Think is produced by Ghost Bureau. I'm executive producer Christopher Shulgan. Senior producer is Russell Gragg. Associate producer is Patricia Karounos. Social media and strategy support is from Chantel Guertin and Andrew Imecs.
[00:30:08.10]
Christopher Shulgan: Remember to rate and subscribe to Eat Move Think on your favourite podcast platform. Follow our host Shaun Francis on Twitter and Instagram @ShaunCFrancis—that's Shaun with a U—and Medcan @Medcanlivewell. We'll be back soon with a new episode examining the latest in health and wellness.
-30-