Episode 414 – Darryl Edwards – Movement and Play

We have our friend Darryl Edwards as guest on the podcast for Episode 414. Darryl Edwards is a Movement Coach, Natural Lifestyle Educator, nutritionist and creator of the Primal Play Method™. Darryl developed the Primal Play methodology to inspire others to make activity fun while getting healthier, fitter and stronger in the process. Darryl is also the owner of Fitness Explorer Training and author of several books including Paleo Fitness, Paleo from A to Z and April 2018 best-seller Animal Moves  His work has been published in titles such as Men’s Health, Women’s Health, Elle Magazine, Men’s Fitness and featured on the BBC documentaries Eat to Live Forever and Doctor In The House.

 

Show Notes:

00:48 – Intro to Darryl Edwards and Primal Play
2:48 – Darryl’s career background, health history, and how he got into paleo
9:10 – What motivated Darryl to do a book and a certification and get into this work
15:38 – Incorporating movement and play-outs in regular life
17:16 – Structure vs unstructured activity for people and for kids
25:01 – Risk assessment for kids
28:06 – Overprotecting kids and losing resilience and risk assessment ability
31:00 – Where to find Darryl
32:55 – Movement Oncology – movement as medicine for cancer
35:00 – Underappreciated movement
36:51 – Thanks

Website: PrimalPlay.com

Certification: PrimalPlay.com/certification

Social Media:
Twitter: @fitnessexplorer
Instagram: fitnessexplorer
Facebook: @fitnessexplorer

Book: Animal Moves

 

Transcript:

Download a copy of this transcript here (PDF)

Paleo Solution – 414

[0:00:48]

Robb: Darryl, how are you doing, my friend?

Darryl: I’m very good, my mate.

Robb: Awesome. It was good seeing you briefly as always at Paleo f(x)™. It’s always two ships passing in the night at that gig, although I do usually about every 5 to 10 minutes I get a blast of wind as you and your entourage have somebody on your back and you go sprinting by, like 22 miles an hour, nearly max human speed unladen and usually have a large human on your back jamming by. What’s new? What have you been up to?

Darryl: Well, since the last time we spoke, which is at Paleo f(x)™, a couple of weeks back, now I was very happy to launch my Primal Play Movement Coach Certification Program in the US. So that was launched about a week or so before Paleo f(x)™. I’m really pleased about that. It’s been several years in the making. I launched in the UK late last year. It was just one way of me to really build on getting some ambassadors on board, those who resonate with my message and those who want to get people to reconnect with natural primal instinctive movements and have a lot of fun doing.

Robb: Well, it’s always awesome seeing you at these different events because you have a huge chunk of people waiting to get in on this stuff. The things that you’ve incorporated, they range from all of these different odd angle movements to some stuff that to me, from my eyes, look derived out of like Greco wrestling and judo, so all kinds of things, move your own body, figure out how to move somebody else’s body, how to respond dynamically in a play-based fashion to interacting with other folks. It definitely is a ton of fun, the stuff that you’re doing.

I do want to dig in a little bit about your history on this whole story because you have a really eclectic background. Primal health was not your first — you’ve literally lived like three or four lives already. Do you want to let folks know a little bit about that background?

Darryl: Yes. So I started out — my previous career was working with an investment banking as a technologist. I was one of a handful of people around the world who could work in a particular area. So it meant pretty much being on call 24/7, seven days a week, 16 to 18-hour days, getting phone calls throughout the night so I was very sleep deprived, very lucrative and my bank balance was extremely healthy. Unfortunately, I wasn’t as healthy.

There’s so much you can take into your 20s and 30s. You can pretty much take an onslaught of abuse — what you do to your body, what you do being sleep deprived. I was privileged enough to have an annual health check, so the three and a half to four hours’ worth of tests and diagnostics telling you how you are holding out. One year I was told, “Actually, Mr. Edwards, we have a problem. We’re concerned about, you know, you’re pre-diabetic. You have elevated risk of cardiovascular disease. You’ve been anemic for a very long time.” I was suffering with chronic low back pain for almost a couple of decades. I was pretty much a mess. Hypertensive, so my blood pressure was something like 155, 160 over 110 on a regular basis.

So almost every time I went to my doctor, I was told, “Look, we need to get you on some meds, some statins, get something to reduce your blood pressure, get some metformin to reduce your blood glucose levels.” I was like, “Is there an alternative.” The alternative was really “We’ll give you something else.” I was like, “Well, okay, I’m concerned about the side effects. I’m concerned about the cocktail of meds. How long do you think I need to be on these for?” “Darryl, pretty much until the end of your days.”

I was fortunate enough to have read a book by Loren Cordain, The Paleo Diet, which I call a shelf-help book because they’ve been on my shelf for probably a couple of years by then, and I hadn’t read it. But there was something I remember on first pass about going back to basics. I recognized that if I was sedentary and I was eating pretty much whatever I could get my hand to and I wasn’t really thinking about what I was eating, I had to at least start off by doing that. I was like, if I’ve got high blood pressure and movement is one way of addressing that, if I’m highly stressed and again exercise is a good intervention for that, let me start moving.

[0:05:37]

So I joined a gym. I started getting active. I started seeing results in my health markers. My blood pressure came down. My cholesterol profile, lipid profile improved. It was all a very good start. Then I start to think to myself, “Well, okay, if I’m eating, if I’m moving well and I’m moving right and I’m moving better, I need to definitely start considering diet that I should go on.” I know you go back a long way, Robb, so the Zone Diet will mean a lot to you. I went to Zone initially. I just got fed up with having to pretty much be so neurotic about measurements. I can only have nine almonds rather than eight. I got to get those percentages right.

I was like, “I can’t continue to do this.” And then I was like, “Hold on a second, that book, that book, remember that Paleo Diet book.” There was something in there about a diet that we evolved, what we’re designed to eat, and that just made sense to me; that we had to move, we had to eat well in order to get to where we are today. Take the best of the past, blend that with the best of the present. It has to be a better way forward for myself.

So that’s what I did. Literally, within a few months, everything had been normalized in terms of my blood test results. I was no longer at risk. In some areas, it was optimal according to the clinicians who were working from me. I decided this is going to be me for the long haul. Unless something changes dramatically, I want to stay on this path.

Fast forwarding on, I then decided I had to do anything to get out of banking. I had to change my career. So I started out in the music biz for a while. I recorded an album. It took about three years to record. It was nominated as one of the top albums of 2005 by BBC Radio 1 in the UK. I toured a bit. I had a number one video on MTV in Latin America, of all places. Fortunately for me, now I can say, is that the record label went bust. So my music career kind of fizzled out, very promising but didn’t work out. But thank goodness it didn’t work out because I was spending time in the studio overnight. I was still making poor health decisions around that time.

So I decided to cross train, nutritional therapy, become a personal trainer. And then I realized I could no longer stay within the banking environment and really do this justice in terms of educating other people. I found I was able to maintain good health. But in order for me to really sell this message, I’ve got to remove myself and really dig deep and really immerse myself into this lifestyle.

That’s pretty much a summation of what I did way back then. And then for the last, when I quit banking in 2011, this is what I’m doing up until now, kind of figuring out what I wanted to do with my newfound passion for life and zest for life and how I could…

Robb: Okay, folks, we’re back. We had a little bit of connectivity issues. Darryl, you were unpacking your history ranging from a pretty interesting tech-based background in banking to a super cool but short-lived music career. But in the process of all that, you discovered you had some serious health issues and really used movement and play as kind of the primary intervention, clearly also with an ancestral diet background to kind of augment that whole story. You’ve been in this space a long time now. What motivated you ultimately to do both a book and a certification? Both of those things are daunting amount of time and resources. What lit a fire under you to do that?

Darryl: I suppose it was when I got contacted after a couple years of my blog. Two, three years of my blog, I got contacted by a publisher in the US to write Paleo fitness. That was the first time, you know, there hadn’t been any books really digging deep on the movement aspects of Paleo. It was mainly a focus on diet and nutrition. That got me really thinking about how important movement and physical activity was from a health perspective, not just getting into shape, not just getting fit but how movement is part and parcel of our progress, of ancestral history, so to speak.

[0:10:08]

A few years on from that, I also recognized that the elites when it comes to fitness I kind of catered for, fitness tends to be for fit people by and large. There were so many barriers to entry. It means that most of us are happier to spectate than to participate. When we had the Olympic Games in London in 2012, there’s always this talk about we want to leave a legacy behind of people are going to become less sedentary, less physically inactive because they will be inspired by watching these superhumans move.

Unfortunately, what happened is participation was actually dropped post event, and that’s been the case for any Olympic Games. There’s always excitement and fervor around “Oh, my goodness! I’m not going to join my local gym. I’m not going to become a rower because I’ve just seen my team win gold,” et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But there’s something about exercise and something about getting fit which doesn’t sit well with our DNA. We’re designed to conserve calories, right? We had no idea where our next meal is going to come from. So for us to optionally burn calories, for us to recreationally burn calories, we need to be usually well fed. It means successful hunt. We can dance around the fire and dance and enjoy ourselves because we know we’re good for now.

And then you go places in a 21st century setting whereby where our environment is engineered for convenience. It’s engineered to make us more sedentary, to feel more comfortable about that sedentary lifestyle decision. We need a really good reason to get off of our armchair, to get off the couch. For some, we’re motivated enough to go, “Right, I need fitness. I need to join my gym. I need to get moving because I know it’s beneficial for me.” But a lot of us are like, “That’s not good enough for me.” You know what I mean? I’d rather sit back and watch reruns of my favorite show on Netflix and be fed grapes by my partner, hopefully. That seems more appealing to many.

So for me, the light bulb moment was what can I do to ensure I’m motivated for a lifelong relationship with exercise and movement? Not just a brief fling, not just a one-night stand. But how can I make this a lifelong commitment? Because we all have a love affair with exercise, right? We go through periods of real excitement, real enjoyment and engagement. We’re telling your friends about our new relationship. “Hey, I’m just doing this exercise class. You’ll love it. You’ve got to…” you know. And then weeks later, some of us ditch it. So how could I marry my need for movement, my need to actually move in a way that was natural and primal and instinctive, but also make it engaging and fun, less pain and punishment, more pleasure and play based?

So that’s how Primal Play came about. It was like play isn’t just having fun and enjoyment. There’s something very serious about it as well. We need to become very strong, fit, fast, capable individuals functionally. But if we can enjoy the process and not just think about the goals, we’re more likely to be motivated, we’re more likely to engage with other human beings, we’re more likely to realize that we’re social beings. We should be interacting with each other when we exercise. We should be able to take on board all of the influences that we’ve had to get us to where we are now.

As you mentioned earlier, some of my work with Primal Play can look quite combative. It can look as if it’s inspired by martial arts or wrestling. As kids, we’re playful, right? There was rough and tumble. No one taught me how to play fight with my brother. No one said that my bed couldn’t be like a dojo, right?

Robb: Most of the time they’re telling you it’s not and don’t jump off the top rope and drop your elbow on its head.

Darryl: Exactly. I remember the wardrobe — my brother and I shared a room — the wardrobe used to be something we would jump off onto the bed and get all sorts of mischief. I suppose I want to take the best of all of those experiences where my gym was my playground. My playground was the world around me. Sometimes that was my bedroom. Sometimes that was my living room. Sometimes that was out at my local park. That exploration, that zest for finding out about myself and the world around me, I wanted to recreate that, reengage with that as an adult.

[0:14:55]

That was really what Primal Play was about: taking play in its purest form, in the form where you can actually exceed any limitations that you have physically. It’s not just about running around in the grass and having fun. I’m like, I want to be really strong. I want to be superhuman. Whatever that is for me, I want to find out what my kryptonite is. What are my weaknesses? I want to work around those. I want to avoid those if I have to. I want there to be a reality about what I want from fitness.

I want to be able to help other people. I want to be able to defend myself. I want to be able to get myself out of difficult spots. I want to be able to make sure that I can carry — I flew back from the US yesterday and I hate not having carry-on luggage, right? So on this occasion, I had four bags, I had to check something in. If you saw me when I got my bag and I was walking, I was on my way home and I was like, “I’m not going to get an Uber.” I was like, whatever it takes, I’m going to take public transport. I had to walk maybe a mile from my local — three quarters of a mile maybe — from my local tube station, metro station to home. I was like stopping every 30, 40 meters. I looked like I was heavily laden, right?

Robb: Because you were.

Darryl: Yeah. It felt fantastic. I’m doing a farmer’s carry of like a huge backpack on my back. I just felt so many people would avoid this experience because I’d say it’s just too much like hard work. I made it a challenge for myself. That’s where the playful aspect came in. I was like, yeah, I feel like I’m on the moon now. Unfortunately, gravity is really having an effect on me, right? I feel like I’ve got a spacesuit on, but it feels like a spacesuit made of lead. I’m hoping that I see somebody that I know who is offering to help me, but it’s not going to happen. I was going to get home and then I can rest.

Creating that scenario, which meant that I wasn’t going to take the convenience route, meant that I got my workout in quotation marks or my playout, more correctly, just on my way home from the airport. So yeah, there are so many things we can do to add more movement minutes to our day.

Robb: That’s awesome. When I think of exercise and I think a lot of other folks, it’s like three sets of 10 on some exercise or something like that. Man, if you want to kill the joy of doing something, have kids try to do that. They’re done. Immediately, they’re done. But what if they want to play? I’m just thinking about Zoe and Sagan, like we have a little bit of acreage and we have goat houses to climb on and trees to play in and all the stuff. They will just wear themselves down to enough doing that. We just put up some kids’ gymnastics rings out in the tree and a climbing rope. Zoe has been like, “Dada, I want to climb up that rope all the way to the top.” I’m like, “Well, we need to do some training for that.”

We do each day, I’m like, “Okay, we’re going to do three sets of five and then we’ll go out and play.” We do some body rows on the rings. But because she’s got kind of a goal and because I don’t make it an hour-long session, we just do this every day and we try to increase the benchmarks a little bit. Both girls basically have a chin up now and all that type of stuff, which is awesome. When they see something that they can’t do and they want to do, then like, “Dada, how do I do that?” I’m like, “Oh, we need to do a little training to do that.”

So it’s interesting, because we’ve been able to keep so much play-based elements to this, they’re motivated. They get that kind of dopamine hit from doing that exciting open-ended stuff. But then also when they’re like, “Man, I want to do that,” then I’ve got a little bit of a carrot to dangle as far as, okay, here’s a little bit more structure, just pulling out of basic strength and conditioning, linear progressions and all that type of stuff to get them stronger or more mobile or explosive, whatever the deal is to be able to do the things that they want to do.

My understanding is you have a lot of that flavor of things in your certification, that we’re trying to get folks to just be as open-ended and broad as possible in their basic movement palette. Let’s say somebody wants to figure out how to walk on their hands or do a handstand pushup for some specific purpose, then you’ve got some more granular progression-oriented stuff to get them there. Can you comment on that push-pull between structure versus open-ended? Because clearly if you want to become a world champion tennis player, like you’re going to do a shitload of serves and backhands and it gets boring at some point. We don’t necessarily want everything to be like that, but also there needs to be a little dose of that to be able to make some progress in these more open-ended activities.

[0:20:02]

Darryl: Yes. I mean, that’s a really good point. I suppose taking back to the tennis player, humans are designed to be generalists of movement, right? In terms of the animal kingdom, we’re pretty poor at any particular domain of fitness or movements, for example, movement pattern, for example, if we compare ourselves sprinting to a cheetah, we’re a waste of time. Even while sheep can run faster than Usain Bolt, right?

Robb: Right.

Darryl: We’re not that strong. Ants can carry up to 100 times his body weight compared to even the strongest of lifters as humans, pretty poor. You could go across the entire animal kingdom and pick out examples where we don’t really fare well in terms of specialists. But as generalists of movement, we do extremely well. We’re jack of all trades. I can sprint. I can climb. I can jump. I can crawl. We are better at covering all bases. So sometimes the penalty of focusing on just one skill set, just one domain means repetitive stress injuries. We’re more likely to be demotivated because of that.

I’m trying to cater much more for general preparedness, I would say, rather than looking at a particular skill set because there are already many systems which can cater for that. If I had the elite tennis player who wanted to work with me, I’d be like, “You know what? When do you have the most fun playing tennis?” They may say, “When I’m having rallies with my partner.” I’m like, “Okay, that’s what we’re going to focus on. Let’s have you and your partner having the best rallies, longest rallies possible, pull out the most amazing movements you can, and that’s going to become more engaging for that individual. It’s taking them away from the mindless drills and taking them more to a mindful approach to getting to that kind of flow state.

I’m not averse to building specialism or skill. We all know about the specific adaptations, imposed demands as kind of set approach to developing a skill set and a fitness set. We know about overload principles about linear progression as we do with nonlinear progressions. I’m trying to cater for the people who hate to exercise for one. I’m also catering for those who need to broaden their scope a little bit from whatever their specialism is. If you cover a wider brace, you’re more likely to become stronger, more flexible, more my mobile of whatever you really want to do. Do you understand?

I think you can have both, but there probably needs to be somebody taking a step back for those who are only focusing on the peak of their pyramid. I want to have the fastest serve on the planet. I want to smash Rafael Nadal when I face him. You’re going to have somebody who’s like, “Just give me an excuse to get off my couch because at the moment, I’m finding it really difficult to maintain a movement practice.” So very broad, very inclusive, very gentle movement patterns.

Anyone who’s done my sessions, oftentimes they’re very surprised. Those who are probably the most physically literate, who believe there’s nothing that I could show them because like, look, if you saw my training program, Darryl, even looking at my training program would probably intimidate you. I’m like, yes, spend a few seconds with me playing this game, and you’ll see that you’ll be challenged in ways that you didn’t know were possible, without patronizing you or me, because our bodies, you know, sometimes recognizing the unknown and being challenged by the unknown, that’s what’s daunting, that’s what’s challenging.

So for your daughters, for example, when they see that tree and they decide, “You know what, Dad? I would love to climb that tree,” and you’re saying, “Okay, kid, I’m going to give you some guidance here. I’m going to give you some of my wisdom.” But part of them is still saying to themselves, “But, Dad, you know what? We need to try some of these out ourselves.” You know what I mean. “We need to work out our own kind of level of risk assessments. We need to work out on our own levels of fear. You can be a safety net, Dad, but let us give this a go a little bit.” So you do need that combination of open and unstructured and unsupervised at times like the parents aren’t watching. You also need at times where it’s like, “Look, kids, I need to be here to show you a better way of getting there, of how you can stay safe and secure.”

So yeah, we need a combination of both. You don’t want your kids just running around, doing whatever they want to. But at the same time, we all know the dangers of helicopter parenting, right? We all know the dangers of not letting our kids develop some resilience on their own. We set them up for danger later in life.

[0:25:01]

Robb: Yeah, you do. It’s a constant push-pull for us because we try to let the kids go outside and maybe not see them for a couple hours. We just listen like, okay, nobody screaming, so I guess it’s all good. But I tell you, there have been so many times where like, “What are those kids up to?” They’ve been really quiet for a long time, which usually means that they’re into something that they know they shouldn’t be into. I’ll walk outside and they’ve taken literally a little red wagon, and then we have a couple of lawn chairs for kids and stools and benches. They have stacked this thing eight feet high. It is the most precarious jumble of danger. They’re doing it out in a bunch of rocks. I walk out and look at it and I try not to freak out but I’m like, “That is super cool. Could we maybe do that on the grass instead of all those boulders?” If you do fall off, it’s probably still going to be a broken arm, but it’s probably not going to be like a split-open head because my thing is always like, okay, trip to the immediate care would suck. Trip to the emergency room with mediflight would really suck. That’s kind of my cut-off like, okay, we’re looking at a mediflight option here, so I don’t really want to go down that road.

You raised a great point. I’m really glad you mentioned that risk assessment program. There’s a risk assessment part of that. There have been some great studies in the past couple of years where kids, and people in general, they learn risk assessment first via movement, and then the brain extrapolates that to the rest of our life. So if we had people who are unable to figure out, oh, is it a good idea for me to take my whole paycheck and go gamble it away? If they never learned risk analysis via movement, we really can’t expect them to have risk analysis in other more intangible areas of their lives. We’ve done a disservice trying to make things so safe.

God, it’s so hard because if one of my kids broke their neck or something and, God forbid, died or something, it would be a crushing, life-changing event clearly. But there’s also this other piece that it’s like those are low likelihood events. We try to risk mitigate as best as we can, again mediflight versus trip to the immediate care and then just let the let the cards fall where they will. That’s so much why I appreciate what you’ve been doing both with your books and just general education and now with the certification because we definitely need to give people the skill sets to be able to start rolling this stuff out because it’s kind of have been lost. But also just the permission, it’s like, it’s okay, there is risk involved with this. We can do this in a smart way and then we go from there. The overall rewards both in quality of life and joy and the building of community, it generally is a massive return on investment.

Darryl: Yeah, I mean, I totally agree. I’m just going to share this statistic review. There are more kids who are admitted to ER falling out of bed now than a generation ago who would be falling out of trees. I mean, imagine that. The kids can’t even fall out of bed. I’m not talking about bunk beds. I’m talking about your standard everyday bed, right? So kids are just so protected and surrounded by fluffy cotton balls in a lot of aspects of life that they are paying the consequences. So there’s a greater risk, in my opinion, having this overly safe, secure world where they have no perception of danger, because then when they are navigating their bed and deciding “Oh, wouldn’t it be a great idea to jump off?” they jump off and twist an ankle because they have no idea what landing from a jump is like. They’ve never been given that opportunity.

I want to maintain my big kid persona for as long as possible. I do want to climb trees. I recognize that I am constantly risk assessing. Will this tree take my weight?

Robb: The YouTube is full of examples where it did not take their weight.

Darryl: Yeah, exactly. So it’s like, hold on a second. I need to become more sensible in some respects at managing and mitigating risk, not to be careless, not to be frivolous. That’s what we want to be giving our kids, right? It’s not like just be carefree and careless and don’t really think about the consequences. No, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You want to be able to safely risk assess in all aspects of life. That initially starts off with a child learning how — I mean, imagine a child learning how to walk. They recognize every time they get up and they start waddling, they may fall. The likelihood is they’re going to fall. But the drive for them to continue to progress with walking is more important than the risk for them of falling, right? They recognize that they have to, there is a cost, and that inspires them to progress.

[0:30:16]

We need that as adults as well. Einstein said the highest form of research is play. It isn’t work. He realized that creativity and exploration actually leads us to achieving more. That’s what got us to explore the world, right? It got out of the savannahs of Africa to populate the entire planet. So I’m inspired about play theory and the health benefits of physical activity combined with play to ensure that, hopefully, most of us will have a reason to do so whether it’s kids of four or kids of 94.

Robb: Right. That’s awesome. Well, Darryl, let folks know where they can track you down, the book, and then also information about the certification.

Darryl: The best place to get hold of me is on my blog, primalplay.com. If you search for me on social media, I’m known as The Fitness Explorer or @FitnessExplorer. My latest book is called Animal Moves. It’s really about us training like animals to become more human. So taking that concept of looking at all the movement patterns that animals engage in and recognize that humans should be doing all of those and to become more human, to become more adept and physically capable and more functional.

Finally, my certification program, if you go to primalplay.com/certification, you’ll have all the details there and how you can become a Primal Play movement coach. I’m looking to really connect with those where this message resonates with them. If you want to encourage their families, their communities, those who they have any interactions with to move more and to recapture it into a movement that they had as kids, as children. That’s really the best place to get hold of me. Google is now my number one friend. If you search for Darryl Edwards on Google, Google will say, “Hey, this is the guy you want to see. This is the guy you want to connect with.” So yeah, thanks, Google.

Robb: Awesome. Well, I will make sure to get all of that in the show notes. Before we wrap up, any other whistle stops? You just got back from Paleo f(x)™. Are you going to be doing any other events either in Europe, the US, or are you homebound for a little bit working on stuff?

Darryl: I’m going to be doing a few events here in the UK. There’s a few lifestyle conferences and those promoting physical activity which I’m going to be engaged in. In terms of my US dates, I’m going to be next doing the Ancestral Health Symposium in Montana in July. So I’m looking forward to that.

An area that I’m specializing in at the moment is looking at something called Movement Oncology. It’s something that I thought about looking at not only movement for prevention of cancer but also therapeutic interventions. So it’s a burgeoning field. It’s something that I’m really passionate about. I, unfortunately, lost my sister a couple of years ago to cancer. Anything that I can do to contribute to somebody dealing with cancer and what they can do from a movement point of view as medicine, that’s what I’m researching actively now and that’s what I’m looking to promote as a way of educating people about the power of movement and movement is medicine.

Robb: That’s awesome. To your point, it’s a burgeoning field, but the preliminary research is really, really interesting; that folks that maintain a good physical activity process during treatment seem to have much, much better outcomes, better quality of life. Man, props to you for getting into that.

Darryl: Yeah, for sure. For example, if you made the decision to have chemotherapy, which can be the most successful treatment pathway for some types of cancer, you’re less likely to have nausea if you undertake quite intensive exercise regimen. It’s very prescriptive. It isn’t just like get your 150 minutes a week of aerobic activity. It tends to be very prescriptive. Do ten minutes of this, do five minutes of this high-intensity protocol, do resistance training four times a week. It tends to be very prescriptive, but the outcomes, the health outcomes is far more favorable, less chance of progression of the disease, less mortality rates if you have this kind of physical activity intervention.

I’m very excited about it. I’m digging deep and delving in deep and find opportunity to speak about it to many people. So look out for that if you are at AHS later in the year.

[0:34:59]

Robb: Awesome, man. Well, can’t wait to see you again. I’m really super stoked for all the amazing work you’ve done. It’s just amazing contribution to this ancestral health scene movement. It’s funny, like people will just keep iterating and iterating and iterating on protein, carbs, fat, but the movement piece is still just an underappreciated, underexplored part of this. It’s a non-negotiable feature. It’s got to be part of this whole story. Just thank you for the hard work you’re doing and making it fun and accessible and also bringing some rigor to the whole process so that really it’s accessible to anyone.

Darryl: Yeah, I appreciate that, Robb. I’m really grateful because I remember when we first met, you’re always an individual who kind of said it isn’t just one thing. You can’t just focus on food because you have to incorporate movement. You have to start thinking about your sleep and quality of sleep. You have to start thinking about mitigating stress, managing stress. I was very fortunate, that’s what I realized that I had to do. You can’t outrun a poor diet, but you also can’t eat your way out of a sedentary lifestyle, right? You can’t be an insomniac and expect that your perfect diet is going to make you healthy if you’re not sleeping well. So yeah, it’s important that we go back to basics and realize nature has given us a prescription for better health. We need to pay attention to nature. Avoiding nature is often to our detriment.

Robb: It is always to our detriment unless we’re talking about mosquitoes and malaria. In that case, I’ll —

Darryl: Yeah.

Robb: But other than that, yeah. Well, Darryl, again, thank you so much. We’ll get all those links in the show notes. I can’t wait to see you again in real life.

Darryl: Yeah, for sure. Give my regards to Nikki, Zoe, and Sagan as well. It’s been a pleasure to see you again, Robb.

Robb: I will do that, and we’ll talk soon.

Darryl: Cheers. Take care. Bye-bye.

[0:37:08] End of Audio

 

 

 

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Robb Wolf

Robb Wolf, author of The Paleo Solution and Wired to Eat, is a former research biochemist and one of the world’s leading experts in Paleolithic nutrition. Wolf has transformed the lives of tens of thousands of people around the world via his top ranked iTunes podcast and wildly popular seminar series.