Welcome to the show, everybody. I'm your host, dr JE Tita. This is the Next Level Human podcast, and today's episode is one that I always love. We are going to talk training, we are going to talk exercise and we are going to talk fitness, and this is for everyone, but I think this topic is perhaps most pertinent to those individuals of you who are in that middle age bracket, you know, between the ages of, let's say, 35 on the low end and 55, 60 on the high end. This middle age group, which I sit squarely in, at 50 years old, this age group is the age group that begins to see that resistance training, cardiovascular training, high intensity interval training, exercise in general, does not seem to pay the same dividends that it once did, and we're going to talk about this specifically in the context of micro workouts Now. A couple episodes ago, we talked about snacks, exercise snacks, or what I often historically have referred to as burst training little intermittent activity spread throughout the day. Research calls that VILPA or VEPA, which stands for Vigorous Intermittent Lifestyle Physical Activity or Vigorous Intermittent Physical Activity, and I want you to go and check out that episode and listen to it along with this one, because these two are somewhat related but very different. Burst training or vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity is activity that is done for one to three minutes at a time and done several times during the day four to ten episodes throughout the day, something that I often do when I travel for a long period of time. Now, micro workouts are workouts that are shorter than traditional workouts, and these are workouts that I have been essentially championing since 2004, when I first started my first company Metabolic Effect, and then when we created Metabolic After first company Metabolic Effect, and then when we created Metabolic Aftershock, metabolic Prime, metabolic Renewal and the new Metabolic Female and Metabolic Male programs, the brand new programs, fitness programs. These are all micro workouts. Micro workouts, as they are defined in the research, are workouts that last between around 10 to 15 minutes and, of course, metabolic aftershock, renewal, prime, metabolic female and male programs fall right into this category as 15 minute workouts, and I'm going to go through the detailed understanding of why this style of workout is so powerful and why I feel adamantly. I am convinced, because I've seen it so often, that this is the style of training that is most most effective and best for those in the middle age group. So let's get into this first sort of discussion. So let's get into this first sort of discussion. Why, jade? Why do you think micro workouts are best for those in middle age? Well, the first thing we need to understand, for many reasons, is that the metabolism when we are younger, the metabolism is more flexible. What do I mean by flexible? What I mean is you can eat more without getting fat, you can eat less without burning muscle, you can go out, a workout in and then feel stiff and sore for the next two days, like you can feel when you are middle-aged, or do a workout and feel like your energy is just sapped for four days after that. We become more metabolically inflexible as we age. Now, many people are going to raise an eyebrow at this, and it bothers me too, to say just age, just in general, is always going to make us more metabolically inflexible, but the fact of the matter is it is going to, and we all know this, and yet it is something that has been lost here of late, over the last 10 years. There's this idea, which I believe is a pie in the sky idea. Perhaps we will get there one day, but there seems to be this sort of mantra that you don't have to age and that you can just stay young forever. And look, let's be clear, I am a functional medicine, natural medicine, lifestyle medicine expert. I am very schooled in all of the things to keep diseases at bay, to live healthy lifestyles, so we can stay vibrant and vital. And yet, 80 year olds, 90 year olds, don't live forever. You know, we do oftentimes get sick, and no matter what and this is going to be a controversial statement to some, but I don't know why it is we all eventually get ill and die. No one is just walking around on the streets vital, and then just one day keels over. In order for you to get sick or in order for you to die, you must get sick at some point, whether that be a heart attack, whether that be cancer. Even if you die in your sleep, you're going to have decline in metabolic function. We do not live forever. Life has a 100% mortality rate and so, yes, we age, and age, by definition, is becoming more metabolically inflexible. Our cells can't respire the same way, can't process nutrients the same way, can't get rid of waste the same way. We all age as a result of that and we don't have anything, even the most powerful medicines, lifestyle medicines, natural medicines, you name it. We have not found anything that can reverse aging and reverse death. There is not anyone on the planet right now who is immortal and, in fact, the vast majority of people are going to die right around the ages of between 75 and 85, regardless of what they do, according to the latest, greatest research. Now, we can all hope that we live those years vitally, and this is what we're talking about. So, when we're using exercise, what we are essentially saying as we age this is for those're talking about. So, when we're using exercise, what we are essentially saying as we age this is for those of you in that 35 to 65 year bracket 35 to 60 years old bracket that you will become more metabolically inflexible. And it is true that if you take care of your body, if you eat well, if you train well, especially doing these microburst workouts or these micro workouts that we're going to talk about you can maintain more metabolic flexibility than you would otherwise. But as you age, you will become more and more metabolically inflexible. Now, you certainly can if you take good care of yourself. We certainly can, and we do have many 60-year-olds who are in better shape, do have many 60 year olds who are in better shape than they were at 30 and who are in better shape than many people 30 years, 40 years younger than them. That's because those individuals have prematurely aged and made themselves metabolically inflexible. But to say that we can just stave off aging altogether is not something that is steeped in any reality or any real science. We do age. We do become metabolically inflexible. The issue that we're going to talk about today is how do we use training to make sure that we stay as healthy and vital and fit and metabolically flexible as possible as we age, so that when we do age or we do get sick and then die, it is not a long, drawn out, chronic process, but rather a smoother transition from living to dying than otherwise would be the case. This is what we're really talking about. Yes, we may one day touch on immortality and we can all live to 200. That is not the reality we live right now. However, we would say that by doing what we're gonna talk about in this episode, you are certainly gonna live more vital, and that is well within all of our potential. We can live more vital and healthy. We can be healthier at 60 than we are at 50. We can be healthier more healthy at 50 than we are at 40 if we have not been doing the things necessary, but it does take a different approach, and that's where we will start out. What is the different approach? Well, very simply, the approach of what we believe in our 20s and most of our 30s was a harder is better approach, right, a longer is better approach, a more is better approach. This is really what we were talking about Just get to the gym as often as you can get to the gym and stay in the gym as long as you can stay in the gym and, when you're in the gym, train as hard as possible. And this is not not a smart approach, I would say. For even the 20 and 30 year olds, but especially for those of us in middle age, it definitely is not a smart approach. And so what we want to do is we want to use a smart approach, not a harder approach, a smarter approach. And this is where micro workouts come in. Now to understand micro workouts, let's first talk about stress. You have heard this from me over and over again. If you're new to this podcast, you'll be hearing it for the first time, but not the last. Our metabolism You'll be hearing it for the first time, but not the last Our metabolism. Many people think of the metabolism as simply an energy managing system, and it certainly does that but more order to carry out this stress sensing and responding. So what I am saying is the stress sensing and responding is the primary directive. The energy management is a result of that. And so what we want to be thinking about when we are working out is we want to be thinking about this idea, and I'll ask the question to you this way Is exercise always stress reducing? Is it always beneficial? Is it always going to help us adapt and become more resilient? What do you think? The answer to that is clearly no, it is not. There is a point of diminishing returns with exercise, and the older we get and the more inflexible we become, that point becomes more narrow. We have a lot less leeway. We need to get enough exercise, but not too much. We have to find the Goldilocks zone. When you're younger and more flexible metabolically, you don't have to work out as much and you can still get results. And you can work out like crazy and get results, but when you are in this middle age bracket, you have got to master the Goldilocks zone. You want your workouts to create an adaptation signal. You want them to create you stress, not distress. Let's talk about that for a minute. So when you expose your body to a challenge, your metabolism to a challenge, one of the things that you want to do is you want to push it just enough so that it registers a disturbance and then back off so it goes. Okay, that was a challenge. Now let me recover from that workout, repair from that workout and also regenerate and adapt to be stronger so I can better handle the next workout. In other words, you want to push yourself to the point where it's uncomfortable enough that the metabolism goes okay, I need to wake up and I need to do something, but not so intense that the metabolism doesn't have the resources to manage and can't recover. This is what we now know as eustress, positive adaptation stress. So think about stress as a dial or a gauge, a speedometer, almost. So as you begin to stress your system out and put yourself into discomfort, what happens is you move into stress and if the stress is enough, but not too much, you hit you stress. And if you take your foot off the gas right at that point and shut down the engine, the body is going to respond beautifully. But if you keep going, you're going to go from you stress to distress. This is where the stress now becomes too much to respond to. This is where the stress now becomes too much to respond to. And if you keep going, whether more frequently or longer or more intensely, you're going to get into dysfunction. And then, finally, if you keep going you're working super hard at work and you're going nonstop and you're burning the candle at both ends and you run into someone who has a cold. And you know that you are more susceptible when you are burning the candle and going, going, going and sleep deprived and all that. You know you're more susceptible to get that cold. And, as a matter of fact, once you get that cold at the early warning signs, if you keep pushing yourself, what's going to happen? That cold is going to get worse. And if you keep going and keep going and keep going, it's going to be hard for you to get better from that cold and that can even turn into disease. Like, for example, the cold gets so bad, the immune system gets so weak, but then now you get a bacterial infection as well. So now you have bacterial pneumonia, when it started out as just a cold or just a low grade flu, and now you've got bacterial pneumonia of the lungs and now you're in big trouble. So we all know what this is like, with getting a cold and pushing yourself too hard. I want you to think about the same thing when you're exercising. So there are different forms of stress. There is the idea of very little stress for very long periods of time. This is going to do nothing, it's not going to stress you out, but it's also not going to help you adapt right. Then there's the idea of extreme stress, or high stress for a short period of time. Now, this high stress for a short period of time is a type of stress that can really help you wake up the metabolism, help it jump into action and, because it's not long-lived, the metabolism can easily recover. So this is the type of stress, this short, intense stress that is most likely to cause you stress adaptation stress Now, of course. Then there is high stress that continues, or moderate stress that continues. This is where we get into chronic stress and this is where the metabolism cannot respond appropriately and will not be able to repair, recover, regenerate and adapt before the next workout session. Their 20s and 30s can certainly do longer duration, moderate intensity and even long duration high intensity workouts. I am suggesting to you that if you're in my age bracket, you should be thinking about intense workouts that are short-lived and, by the way, research is very clear on this and there are reams and reams and reams and thousands and thousands and probably tens of thousands of studies on short duration, high intensity workouts for everyone, not just for people in the middle age bracket, but this tends to do better for people who are 20, 30 and beyond. In other words, if you take runners, long distance runners, and you have them do their moderate intensity or long duration workouts for 60 to 90 minutes, you're going to see immune parameters, things like cortisol, things like secretory IgA and immunoglobulin that lines the mucous membranes of the body. You're gonna see those things change in negative directions. However, if you have those same people do high intensity interval workouts let's say, for 40 minutes or 20 minutes, super high intensity, but not for 60 to 90 minutes you'll see those same parameters either stay the same or even get better. This is in younger people, and so what we need to understand is, even in the younger people, high intensity, short duration workouts have better immune effects, better regeneration effects and even have comparable, if not better at times, effects on some of the fitness parameters VO2 max and other parameters we would be interested in in terms of aerobic capacity and other things. So there's a strong argument to be made that, across the board, short, intense workouts are better than long, moderate or, and especially, long, intense workouts. I'm going to make a further argument here that, for the individuals who are in the middle age brackets, like me, this is actually critical. It becomes not just a perhaps alternative where you can either pick and choose, but I think it becomes the dominant form of activity you should be doing. That is going to get you the results and not cause you to overdo it. Now I want to add one more thing to this in a minute, because there's another way to make exercise even more tailored to you and even less likely to trigger this downslide in immune function and overdoing it. That's called rest-based training, which I'll get into a minute. But first I want to talk about why these micro workouts, these 10 to 15-minute workouts, 10 to 20-minute workouts, these 10 to 15 minute workouts, 20 minute, 10 to 20 minute workouts, 15 sort of being what I like as the sweet spot are better. One of the things just to know is that most people, when they think about exercise and especially if you're my age, in this middle age range, and you're just getting into exercise and you've never heard this argument before you grew up in the 80s and early 90s, so you're probably coming at this from a calorie burn phenomenon. Now, remember, we talked about the idea that most people see metabolism as just an energy management system calorie burning, calories in, calories out and it does do that, but it's more a stress sensing and responding apparatus. And from that perspective, what we want to be looking at is we want enough stress, but not too much stress, and we want to switch the way we look at workouts from how many calories did I burn into how efficient was that workout? And so I want to just walk you through some calorie math really quickly. Let's say we go and do a workout together and one of the workouts we do is a 60 minute moderate intensity jog on a treadmill, and let's say, during that 60 minutes, we burn 300 calories, 400 calories. Let's say 400 calories, that's what we burn. Ok, so most people go. Well, that's what you should be doing 60 minutes, burn as many calories as you can. Now let's say we do a 20-minute high-intensity interval training workout on a bike, okay, where we push hard for one minute and rest for one minute, and we do that for 10 rounds now. So that's 60 minutes versus 20 minutes. So where did we burn more calories during the workout? Well, we burned a lot in the high-intensity interval training workout because we pushed harder, but we went much longer in the 60 minute jog. So the truth is, a 60 minute jog is going to win. We're going to burn more calories. And for the sake of argument, let's say we burn 400 calories on the jog and let's say we burn 200 calories on the high intensity interval workout. Now most people would say, well, it's all about calories. You should do the jog, the moderate intensity stuff, or, even better, do the high intensity stuff longer. Right, do that for 60 minutes so we can burn even more calories. What they're missing here is the fact that when you stop exercising, that's when all the compensatory mechanisms kick in. So when you do this 60-minute workout, one of the things that happens is the afterburn effect, something in research called EPOC excess post-exercise oxygen consumption. Epoc is the amount of energy you burn after the workout. After a moderate intensity 60 minutes, that amount of EPOC afterburn is going to be much less. You don't burn many calories after that workout. Once you stop running on the treadmill, you stop burning calories At the same time. Now, when you do the high intensity interval 20 minute workout, yes, you burn 200 calories, but we now know the EPOC effect, the afterburn effect, the excess post-exercise oxygen consumption is much greater. Now this is an area of research that is very individualized, meaning that individuals some individuals get huge EPOCs, some individuals don't and the amount of afterburn is contingent on a lot of different things Exercise modality, exercise intensity being the big one. So if you do very high intensity resistance training, let's say, like a very intense CrossFit workout lifting very heavy weights, you're going to get a big epoch, and some research shows that that epoch can last not hours but days. And the way to think about this is just think about it this way. It's a simpler way to think about it. When you're doing a super intense workout and you finish, the body has to first recover and it uses energy to do that, and then it has to repair, and so for the first several hours you're recovering, your heart rate's slightly more elevated. There's all kinds of fatty acid recycling going on, lactate reshuttling going on, all of this kind of stuff, and you're burning some calories. Then, over the next hours and days, into the next day, you're recovering and, by the way, you oftentimes know what this feels like. Right, you might even be a little bit sore. There's all kinds of things going on where now not only did you burn extra calories from recovering from the workout, but now you're burning extra calories from repairing. And then, if you pushed hard enough, but not too hard, you're actually going to start using extra calories to lay down more collagen and to lay down more muscle and to adapt. And so when you do short, intense micro workouts, you're going to burn calories during the workout. You're going to burn calories during the recovery process from the workout. You're going to burn more calories from the repair process of the workout and you're going to burn more calories from the adaptation, regeneration aspects of the workout. And that can take up to three, maybe even four days, depending on the intensity and modality of the workouts. Meanwhile, that 60 minute treadmill workout, not so much, you stop running, the burn stops. Not to mention there's another element here when these micro workouts are using resistance training and you put on more muscle. Adding that extra muscle does not do a whole lot for you calorie burning in terms of how much you burn at rest. This is the old idea that if you put on a pound of extra muscle you're going to burn hundreds of extra calories at rest a day. This is not true. The number is closer to something like six to 30, based on the research you read. It's not that big of a deal. And even fat a pound of fat at rest burns like three to six calories, so there's not much of a difference. But when you start moving that extra muscle, you start burning more calories. And so there's a fifth element here to these micro workouts, not to mention, with that 60 minute moderate intensity workout, you are changing cortisol, perhaps in negative directions, you are changing immune parameters, perhaps in negative directions, and you aren't getting the adaptation signals to the same degree. And let me explain this to you as well, because I really want to drive this home for you. When you do moderate intensity, long-duration exercise stuff that's in the aerobic zone right, this stuff is certainly can be healthy, but because you never go anaerobic, because you never push yourself to get breathless or burning. What happens is you never actually trigger some of the hormones responsible for adaptation, like testosterone and human growth hormone. For example, when you do super intense workouts and your muscles burn and you get breathless and they're straining throughout your joints, that is the trigger and the stimulus for things like testosterone and human growth hormone. And when testosterone and human growth hormone and when testosterone and human growth hormone combine with some of the stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline and other things, this is an adaptation signal for the body and because you have testosterone and human growth hormone around, your joints can get stronger, your muscles can get stronger and perhaps you can grow tissues and grow muscles and respond and adapt. However, now imagine all you're doing is running constantly. You never stimulate yourself to that place where the muscles, the joints, the bones can actually respond and get stronger. And what can happen is you can actually see decrements in joint health, in bone density, in muscle. This is why you can see people who are chronically doing this cardiovascular, long duration, moderate intensity stuff oftentimes suffer from joint issues. Bone issues Oftentimes don't have a whole lot of muscle on their bodies issues oftentimes don't have a whole lot of muscle on their bodies. There's a very different response here. Not to mention, you can start seeing some issues with inflammation and other things. Now what's hard for us in our middle age times to understand is we used to be able to do this when we were 20 and 30 and get great results from it. What we don't realize now is that with a different metabolism comes different metabolic realities and we may be doing more harm than good now. Our bodies may not be able to respond to this, not to mention it probably responds better for everybody to stimulate the body to an anaerobic point at times, even individuals who are at their best in the aerobic world. Now many of these top athletes will include resistance training just to offset some of the loss in muscle and things like that that can come along with chronic long intensity types of exercise. So we have been very wrong with this in general and it is much more, in my mind, a problem for those of us like me in middle age, which brings me back to those micro workouts. So where did we burn the most calories and where did we do the most good in terms of adaptation signals for our body? Probably the short types of workouts that are intense. Now imagine we take that high intensity interval training workout on a bike and now we start adding resistance training to it, basically fast-paced resistance training. Call it resistance training, where it is not cardio but lifting weights faster. And I don't mean lifting weights in terms of faster, in terms of lifting speed, I mean lifting weights faster in terms of less rest between the bouts of resistance training. When you do that now, you get the breathless effect along with the burning and the straining effect, and because the workout is short, you go anaerobic. You get these adaptation signals human growth hormone and testosterone kick in and your body now has the adaptation signal. So you get the benefit of the calorie burn from recovering, from repair, from adaptation and from adding extra tissue and moving it later. This is what we want to be doing. We want to assure that we are getting enough, but not too much. Shorter duration, high intensity workouts do a better job than long duration, moderate intensity and especially long duration, super intense workouts. This is absolutely clear in the research and it's something that especially us in middle age need to take into account. Now add resistance training to this and you've got a really powerful way to make a very resilient metabolism that, despite the fact that your metabolism is indeed going to become less and less flexible as you age. Flexible as you age. You can stave off aging and disease and degeneration by getting enough exercise, but not too much exercise. And I'm going to add one more element to this. That is, my contribution to this field. Actually, back in 2004, my brother and I developed a technique called rest-based training that is now used in many places around the world and in personal training, and rest-based training is a very simple concept. You can understand how to do rest-based training by learning a very simple mantra that goes push until you can't, rest until you can. In fact, my brother and I were the developers of Metabolic Effect back in 2004 that popularized rest-based training. We also wrote a book back in 2010. That was the first book that ever talked about this concept and was one of the first books that talked about hormonal weight loss in general. That was actually a Time magazine, a book of the year that year called the Metabolic Effect Diet, and rest-based training simply takes this notion of short, intense, micro workouts and adds in an individual element. Because here's the problem with interval training in general. If I tell you, if I take a group of a thousand people and I say I want everyone to push as hard as they can for a minute and then rest for a minute. That is going to be easy for some very few, but easy for some. Some are going to be like got it, done it and they're going to respond and their body's going to respond and adapt. For others it's going to be just right, but for most people it's going to be too hard and because it's too hard, they will either injure themselves, overpush themselves, overstress themselves or they will pace themselves and never actually get to the adaptation signal that is needed. However, back in 2004, when I was reading research on this, what I discovered is that animals animals in their natural settings naturally push until they can't, rest until they can. If you see a squirrel run across the road, or you ever watched a pet gerbil run on a wheel, what will happen is they will run hard for a little bit and then they'll stop and rest and look around and then they'll run hard again. What researchers showed is that mammals do this in natural settings to maximize the distance covered, the work done, in minimal time. In other words, if a squirrel just took off running and didn't do it in these intermittent bursts, then what would happen is it would probably peter itself out. So what it does is it pushes it at rest. It pushes it at rest and because it rests, it can actually run faster away from predators and other things and it can cover more ground in less time. We humans actually can do the same thing. There was an interesting research study where they took conditioned runners and they basically said what we want you to do is we want you to run this particular distance around the track and then we want to see how long it takes you to recover. And we're going to measure all your parameters like lactate and heart rate and respiration rates and all that kind of stuff. And what they showed in this study is that when individuals ran as hard as they could, it took about two minutes for these runners, these trained runners, to recover. And then what they did is they say you know what we're not going to tell you, we're not going to give you the time now. What we want you to do, we just want you to push, and then we want you to rest as long as required and as soon as you feel like you are ready to go again, go ahead and go again. We're not going to time you, and what they found was these individuals, on average, took about 118 seconds, roughly the exact two minutes that the researchers measured when they were measuring them, and what they basically showed is humans in this study, also had the ability to self-regulate, and what this means is you may not be an elite runner, but what this does mean is that you can push yourself as hard as you can for as long as you can stop, rest until you're ready to push again and you're going to get the exact right intensity for you, the right adaptation signal. We humans can self-select exercise intensity, and what other research showed is that what most people think will happen. If you tell someone, hey, just push as hard as you can and rest as long as you need to, most people would think that we would then sandbag. We would just not push ourselves hard. In reality, we push harder. We push less hard when we're told just go as hard as you can for as long as you can and don't stop. At that point, what we do is we pace ourselves. But when we're told, hey, just push as hard as you can, rest whenever you need to get back into it when you're ready, we actually push harder per unit time, and this also was an understanding that me and my brother Keoni had at the time, which was, oh my gosh, if people can self-select exercise intensity, that means we can push them harder, let them cross that anaerobic threshold, get all these hormonal signals testosterone, human growth hormone and others and also keep them safe they won't injure themselves and, most importantly, have them not overdo it. So what we started to do is we moved from 40 minute to 60 minute workouts, down to 20 and 15 minute workouts, having them push harder and having them push until they can't rest, until they can, using rest-based training, and what this did is completely individualize the workouts for individuals, and what we found is we could give you the exact same workout. Everyone could be doing the same workout. An elite athlete could be doing it with a grandmother who hasn't worked out in three years, and they will each get the intensity needed for them, and this completely changed the game for us and we began to see amazing results. And we found that, specifically for women, this style of training was profound Because for women in particular, as opposed to men, one of the things that happens is women go through their menstrual cycles and what we now know in the first half of the menstrual cycle, the follicular phase of the menstrual cycle, females have a different metabolic reality. With estrogen dominating at this time, they can push harder, they can recover better. However, in their luteal phase, when progesterone is dominating, that is not the case. They are more sensitive to all kinds of stress, including the stress of resistance and training and cardiovascular training, and so this was a way that, simply by saying, push until you can't, rest until you can, without them even knowing they were adapting their workouts to their menstrual cycle. And, of course, men or women, we all have different days that we feel better or not, many of us like. Right now, I'm wearing an aura ring, a tracker that measures heart rate variability. Some days I sleep well, some days I'm recovered well, some days I'm not. I don't have to worry about am I going to overdo it, because I just push until I can't, rest until I can, and my body intuitively sets so that I'm not overdoing it. And so not only are these micro workouts more important from my perspective for the middle-aged, but they are more effective and they keep us safer and assure that we don't get injured and adapt to our fitness level and our physical ability and allow us to maintain adaptation instead of overdoing it, and this has profound ramifications in the workouts that are going to be most beneficial for those of us in this middle aged 35 year old up to 60 year old and even older. I would even say, if you're someone and you're saying, hey, jade, what about me? Like, I'm past 60. I'm in my 60s, 70s, 80s Even. I have seen this situation be very profound for those who are a little bit older, because they're even more metabolically inflexible, and so this is very profound as well, and this is the way that I think even older adults should be training too. So I hope you enjoyed today's podcast. This, to me, is where you want to be moving. One thing I'll say before I let you go, though, because you might be wondering well, jade, how much, if you're a conditioned person in their 50s like me and you've been at this a while you still want to do short duration workouts. I don't do any workouts anymore that are much over 30 minutes. Most of them are right around the 15 to 20 minute mark, so I use these micro workouts almost exclusively. The workout programs I've built Metabolic Female, metabolic Male, renewal, aftershock Prime are all micro workouts. They're all these guided, rest-based micro workouts. Even Metabolic 10, the most advanced program that I do, which is the one that I mostly do there are very few workouts that are over 30 minutes. Most of them are right around 15 to 20 minutes and just a few that maybe go up into the 40 minute mark, but none in the the 60s. By the way, there is some research showing 40 minutes might be the threshold, even for those who are younger in terms of intensity, where adaptation and recovery start to become compromised. If you are someone who's fit, what I would say is your condition. I would say what you want to also be looking at is not only do you want to be doing micro workouts, but you want enough recovery in between. If you're a beginner, no more than three workouts a week, it's enough. Matter of fact, it's more than enough, and these days in between help assure you adapt. If you're someone who is a little bit more intermediate, I would say four workouts a week and even for those who are the most advanced, I would say five at most. Once you get up into six or seven of these workouts, that can be tricky unless you are on point with your nutrition. So for those of you who are beginners, three times per week. One to three times per week. Even those of you who are intermediates, three to four times per week. Those of you who are more advanced four to five, six at the very most. But that's going to be those of you who are more advanced four to five, six at the very most. But that's going to be those of you who are more athletically inclined. But these micro workouts are going to be the thing that changes everything. Also, you probably heard an ad on this podcast, but I'll go ahead and tell you, even if you didn't, the new metabolic female and metabolic male programs. If you've never done these workouts, I suggest you check those programs out, because they are guided, follow along, micro, rest-based workouts, exactly as what I was describing here in this podcast. These are the things that you want to do Now. Add walking into that, and that should be all that is required for your fitness. And then, of course, diet is critical and we'll have other things coming soon. I'm going to do a whole podcast here soon on how to eat when you're working out, sort of the EMEM, athletic, you know, metabolic toggle. All right, everybody, I'm right at about 40 minutes of this podcast. I hope you enjoyed this one, especially if you are a middle-aged exerciser who's feeling the aches and pains and feeling like working out is just sapping your energy. You're likely overdoing it. Micro workouts, rest-based style is where you want to move and I promise you you're going to get the results. All right, everybody. Thank you so much for hanging out on the podcast today and I will see you at the next show.