7 Things EVERY Healthy Guy Does (COPY THESE!)

So you want to be healthy. That's great. And I'm here to help you because I have the list right here, seven things that every healthy guy does that all you need to do is copy. So take out your notepad and a pencil and let's go through these. Number one, read along with me, please. You have to follow a carb restricted diet. Number two, juice fast once every six weeks. Very specifically, six weeks, a month and a half. Next, have testosterone levels greater than 850 nanograms per deciliter. You don't know what yours is. You can always test that and find that out. Number four, cold plunge six out of seven days per week. A lot of people are doing that. You should, too. Number five, perform hyperbaric oxygen therapy before bed. A little bit complicated. I'll tell you how to do that in a second. Number six, have sub 6% body fat levels. I could speak from experience there. I'll tell you why you should as well. And number seven, they inject 200 milligrams of low grade beaver tranquilizer daily. God damn you, Bernice! Wait a second. Beaver tranquilizer? Wait, Jesse, isn't that what – did you put that list together? Okay, that's all bullshit, but let's go through the real list. What are seven things that you can do to ensure that you're healthy, or at least healthier than you are today? Well, the first thing is, you're not going to find healthy people actually associating six pack abs, or low body fat levels with health because it's only one piece of the puzzle. Sure, having six pack abs would mean that you have low body fat levels, but is that the whole picture? No. So what you want to do is be more broad in terms of how you're assessing your overall physique because you could have six pack abs, but at the same time have your hair falling out, have brittle nails, maybe even yellow, jaundiced eyes, and think that you're healthy because you see a six pack in the mirror. When I would argue, you're definitely not. Same token, maybe you're at slightly higher body fat levels. The abs are not so visible. But you run ultra marathons every weekend, you're on no medications, and you have no nutritional deficits. Who's the real healthy one here? Now, I'm not saying to turn a blind eye to your body because all the things I just mentioned are indicators of overall health. Check the status of your nails. Check the status of your hair. Pay attention to those signals when they start to happen. Turn around and look behind what you left in the toilet every, single morning because all these things are good indicators. But don't just use your six pack abs as the main, defining metric for whether or not you're healthy or not. Number two. Healthy people – and I know some of you guys might hate me for this, but let me explain – you're all going to be able to do at least five pullups. And I understand that pullups become a lot more challenging the heavier you become. But I will give you an example here. Brian Shaw, world's strongest man. He can do over six pullups at a bodyweight – you ready? – of 420lbs. And here's proof of it now, if you didn't believe me. Why is it that pullups are such a great indicator of overall health? Because they tell a lot about your overall capabilities. Number one. To do a pullup you have to have a strong core. To be able to hold yourself up on that bar, especially as you become heavier and heavier, you need to have good grip strength. You need to be able to execute good upper body pulling strength to pull yourself up from a dead hang. You need to be able to get through full range of motion at your shoulders to be able to assume the position of doing the pullup. But I will say this. You also probably need to be at a good percentage of body fat to lean mass ratio to be able to do them effectively. And that means they're a good indicator of whether or not you're carrying too much body fat right now. Because the people that are going to struggle with pullups, especially as they get heavier, are the people that are carrying excess body fat and aren't just heavily muscled. Even the heavily muscled people will be able to do this, but if you can't, it's likely because you don't have enough lean muscle mass and you're going to need to fix that. The third thing that people do, along those lines, if you're going to be healthy, you're going to have to resistance train. I didn't specifically say weight training, I didn't specifically say using bands. You need to be doing some sort of progressive resistance training. So if you like bands, use them, but try to continue to get stronger at them. If you prefer calisthenics, do it, but progressively try to handle more and more challenging variations of the exercises that you're doing. The easiest way to do this is just by simply lifting weights and always trying to increase the amount of weight that you're lifting. Because I will tell you, as you get older, you're going to get weaker. It's a fact of life. Science shows us that we lose strength with each progressing decade, but you can fight that battle if you work on building your strength through the weight training and the resistance training that you're doing. Now I don't care what split you're following. I really don't. You can follow push-pull legs, upper body, lower body, total body training, split muscle group training. All the bro splits. They all work, but you have to stay consistent with them and stay dedicated to a plan. I just talked about how your body is not a sole indicator of your overall level of health, but I will tell you this, your body is a billboard for your consistency and for your commitment to what you're doing. You need to be committed to the work that you're doing in the gym, and as a side effect, you're actually going to not just be stronger, but look better. So it's going to start to feed itself. The fourth thing that you need to make sure you're doing if you want to be considered healthy is you have to practice what I call the Illity Trio. The Illity Trio. That is mobility, flexibility, and stability. What that means is you can't just be so one-dimensional about loving the weight room. You've got to make sure that you're working on your range of motion. Maintaining the flexibility of the muscles. Maintain the natural function of all the joints in your body because all that's going to happen again as you age is you're going to start to lose the function of those joints and muscles if you don't maximize the potential in the range of motion. Now the crazy thing is, it's as simple sometimes as just doing full range of motion on all the exercises that you're doing in the gym. Yes, that is a strike against all the people that love their lengthened partials these days without realizing there's a much bigger picture here at play. If you go through a full range of motion on all the exercises that you do, you will maximize a lot of the muscle flexibility that you have right now and minimize the loss of it as you get older. Working on some mobility in your hips, or your shoulders, as you start to notice, hey, I can't even reach behind my back anymore and reach my hand up. I can definitely not touch my hands behind my back. That's a problem because at one point you could. Or I can't even go down to the floor without having my ankles come off of the ground because I don't have good ankle mobility, or hip mobility. That's a problem because at one time you could. So you want to make sure that you're maximizing that by paying a little bit of attention there. All this, though, requires that you have the function and ability to be able to balance your body in space and have stability. Because I've pointed out before, even the strongest person in the world – let's say he's not the strongest, but let's say you squat 400lbs – if I then told you to go do it on a stability ball – which, by the way, would be the dumbest fucking recommendation I could ever make – but I told you to do it, would you be able to do it anymore? The answer is no. Why? Because I've cut out the stability. I can weaken any level of strength by cutting out the stability. You need to maintain stability to be able to maximize the strength that you're building in the gym in the previous step. So that means working on your balance. You want something goofy to do? Try this. It's called the Old Man Test. I actually posted this about three, or four months ago. Most people, or a lot of people, can't even do it. Your job is simply to put your socks and your shoes on the floor, stand on one leg, lean over, grab the sock, put it on without losing your balance, grab the shoe, put it on without losing your balance, and then, of course, go and do the other side the same way without ever losing your balance. It is a lot more demanding than you think it is because you do need good glute strength. You do need good mobility in your ankles, and mobility through your feet and your midfoot. But do you have that, or have you lost those capabilities because you don't work on it anymore? The last thing I'll say about the ilities, there is also a mental ability. Your ability to function in life that should never be overlooked. Look it. Life is difficult. If you're not doing something to address your ability to navigate life more easily – meaning, talking to a therapist if you can afford one, or using meditation, or reading books – things that can help your own mental health. I think you're losing out on a great opportunity, too. The healthiest people will say that their mental health is always part of the equation. The next thing you're going to want to make sure you focus on is maximizing your VO2 max. That is a representation of your overall cardiac fitness level, or your aerobic fitness level. So what am I talking about here? Your ability to deliver oxygen to your tissues and utilize that oxygen. Because if you walk up a flight of stairs right now and you're huffing and puffing, then likely you're not focusing on this enough. I can tell you, the one area that I probably don't do enough of is enough cardio conditioning. Now, how much time do you need to spend here? Well, the good news is, when you're trying to maximize your VO2 max, not a whole hell of a lot of time. You need to have high intensity bouts of exercise. Think of high intensity interval training. Two minutes of hard, high intensity activity. Two minutes of a lower intensity activity. One minute of high intensity activity. One minute of lower intensity activity. Building up your tolerance to these all-out, maximum efforts to really drive your heart rate up and teach your body how to, again, recruit oxygen and deliver it to the tissues where it can actually be utilized so that you have a higher capacity to do work without being leveled, or brought to your knees. Now, number six is one that people always seem to trip up on because it's a high area of focus, but really, in truth, the healthiest people in the world do not diet. I know you've probably spent a lot of your time in your life trying to decide which diet to follow, but you know how I feel about this already. The whole purpose of a diet is simply to give you a plan that's a short-term fix for something much bigger. You need to be able to solve a much longer standing issue, and that is, you need to find a lifestyle of eating that works for you, that you actually enjoy because you'll never think about temporary solutions, or diets ever again. If you're on a diet, at some point, I can guarantee you, you will be off of that diet. The key thing here is, I don't care what style of eating you adopt. Whether or not you believe in intermittent fasting, or you don't, whether you think you should follow a vegan diet, or not, whether you think you should follow paleo, or you should be Mediterranean, all of it doesn't matter to me. What matters most to me, and what should matter to you, is that you find an eating style that you actually, like I said, enjoy, and can consistently stick to. Not just for the next week, or two, or month, or two, or year, or two, but for the rest of your life. The healthiest people know this, and they follow a nutritional plan that is really providing their body with all the nutrients they need, gives them the energy they need, and it also allows them the opportunity to indulge when they want to, and to still enjoy the things that they find enjoyable. You should not feel as if you're depriving yourself if you've found the right nutritional lifestyle. Again, to be a lifestyle you have to have the ability to do the things that you still enjoy doing. The last thing, guys, that you need to be able to do is, within those parameters of how you eat, stop focusing on the wrong thing. Stop focusing on carbohydrates, or fats. For years, the thing I focused on, hyper-focused on fats. Does it have fat in it? Yes. I don't want it. Again, I was a product of the 80's, where low-fat diets were a thing. Instead, focus on protein. Your focus should always be on protein. I understand that carbohydrates present the biggest challenge when it comes to overeating, and overindulging, and causing weight gain. Which could cause some of the other problems we already talked about. But in terms of meeting strict, nutritional bare minimums, your protein should be there. You should be aiming for around a rough estimate of one gram per pound of bodyweight. Because we know the thing about protein is that even in slight caloric deficit, we can still build muscle tissue if we are prioritizing our protein and getting enough of it. We also know that even when we're pursuing weight loss, and we follow the calories in, calories out equation – taking in less than we're burning off – yeah, we're going to lose weight. But if you don't care about the contribution of the proteins that you're taking in, you could lose a lot more muscle mass in the pursuit of just losing weight. That's not ideal. In order to push the balance of loss of body fat in your favor, rather than muscle mass, you're going to want to focus on prioritizing protein. That being said, guys, all of these things help. As a matter of fact, if you want to prioritize your protein as well, and use a high quality protein, my ATHLEANX Premium Protein Pro 30G you can find over at ATHLEANX.com. If you want a sample of a mobility, or flexibility routine that you can do every morning that will only take you five minutes, make sure you check out this video here. Also, watch the latest video we have here, and subscribe and turn on notifications so you never miss a video when we put one out. All right, guys. See you soon.