In this episode, I’m happy to welcome Borge back for another conversation about fitness. But this time, he’s focusing on the importance of mindset.
However, this isn’t the same mindset information you’ve heard in other places. Borge has decades of experience as a fitness expert, and he’s now approaching health through an incredibly authentic, honest, and highly effective lens that I think will help you achieve your goals, too.
Table of Contents
In this podcast, Borge and I discuss:
- Why he switched his focus from purely muscle building to mindset, and the fascinating concept of the Dunning-Kruger effect that fueled this shift
- Why a big-picture view of health, fitness, and even life might be the best context for understanding new information (and living happily!) versus getting lost in the details
- Our own personal journeys in the fitness industry and why comparison truly is the thief of joy
- The role of social media in how we perceive ourselves and the illusion of optimal that it promotes; unfortunately, the algorithm rarely rewards authenticity
- The signs that let you know someone is lying to you on social media
- One major step Borge took to bring more honesty and authenticity into his already powerful message
- Understanding when you should self-experiment and when you should follow a protocol…there’s a time and place for both!
- Is biohacking really as valuable as everyone says it is? Or is there a more simplistic approach to health that’s just as effective?
- The importance of enjoyment as part of our health routines…don’t forget to achieve your goals AND have fun!
Listen or download on iTunes
Listen outside iTunes
Transcript
Ari: Borge, welcome back to the show, my friend.
Borge: Thank you. It’s an honor to be here again.
The Dunning-Kruger effect
Ari: Yes. In this podcast, I want to talk to you more about mindset. I think to get into that, it would be useful for people to hear why you have shifted in terms of your own personal interests more away from the details of the nitty gritty and the endless discussions and debates over all the details of how to train, to grow muscle, to get stronger, and how to eat, to build muscle, and to lose fat. I think over the last several years, I’ve seen you shift more and more towards an interest in psychology and mindset. Can you describe to people why you’ve been making that shift?
Borge: That’s a great question. I was actually reflecting on just that question this last couple of hours as I was watching an interview with a guy explaining Robert Keegan’s stages of psychological development. That really resonated with me because they explained how most of us during the 20s were obsessed about building bigger biceps and creating wealth, most of all. We’re obsessed with that because we believe that’s the way to feel happy.
As we move along the stages of psychological development, and that really felt like my own story, my own journey, you begin to reflect on your own thinking and your own values and your own choices and behaviors, and perhaps start questioning why you do what you do and if it truly makes you happy. For me, I guess I’ve always tried to question my own beliefs. I wouldn’t say always. I had my period of time where I was overly confident in my abilities and my knowledge. Then Kruger hit, and I started to realize how little I actually know.
Ari: I find whenever that topic comes up, most people don’t know what Dunning-Kruger is. Maybe it would be worth a brief digression to explain to people what that is. I would recommend also people do a Google image search for it because it might help to visualize it. There’s some funny memes with the term Mount Stupid in them, which will hopefully make a bit more sense after Borge explains this.
Borge: Yes, exactly. If you can illustrate a curve of your own knowledge, it will go like this slowly upwards. Your confidence in your own knowledge will be like a peak, which drops precipitously on the other side, and then slowly starts building up again, which basically means that at a certain level of knowledge, quite early in your career, you believe you’ve learned it all, you know it all. That’s what’s defined as the peak of Mount Stupid, because you basically don’t know what you don’t know yet. As you begin to learn more and discover how little you actually know, you start to feel stupid. That’s `the valley of despair. I’ve been through that.
I guess I go through that all the time where I feel like, geez, there’s so much I still don’t know yet. I keep questioning my own beliefs about things. I like the motto, strong beliefs held loosely, and I try to live according to that. Once I started to question my own understanding and beliefs, because, I can still overthink, I can still ruminate, I can still be struck by these OCD going down rabbit holes on different physiological mechanisms and, mechanistic speculations and what have you.
I also try to catch myself doing that so that I can zoom out and see the bigger picture and try to piece things together, and I guess that’s the very core of my philosophy to try to see the bigger picture and where the pieces fit, and then also to create a philosophy based off of what works in certain contexts and what doesn’t, so that we stop this dichotomous thinking where there’s only one truth and, regardless of who you are and where you live and what stage of life you’re in.
I was just going through those phases and stages of psychological development and started to question my own beliefs and my own understandings and my own goals and perhaps even more focusing on the journey in and of itself instead of having goals at all. That provided some peace of mind, and the more I worked with clients one-on-one these last 5 to 10 years, I worked more one-on-one through conversations and discussions where email is a limiting medium. It has its benefits because you can sit down and concentrate and really explain what you mean, and the other person can do the same thing, but as you also speak to people, there’s a certain human connection there that’s easily lost in translation when you just write emails and communicate through that medium.
It also showed me, because I think we all go through certain stages of our life thinking that everyone thinks the same thing we do, that we all share the same perspective on the world, and the more you talk to people, the more you see how, sure, there are many similarities, but there are also many differences in perspective that is probably the root of misunderstandings and communication and why people basically don’t get along or don’t accept that we all have different perspectives. What I kept seeing, in not just the fitness industry, but I guess, I’ve been having a fit in different industries along the way as I’ve also built businesses and consulted with others building businesses in different industries, it’s basically the same thing.
It’s like human behavior. We have our biases, we have our perceptions, we have our egos, and we all just want to, first and foremost, ensure that our own needs are fulfilled and usually everyone else is second. Again, we can claim to be philanthropists, but still, even then, there’s some central ego there that still wants to make sure that you remain happy. I guess that was just a long way to describe that my journey has been filled with going all the way to the other side, where I just had shame and regret of chasing for sequels and, having big biceps and being lean, and almost thinking that I was wrong about everything, suffering hard from what they call the imposter syndrome.
Now, perhaps having a more bigger picture understanding of the whole thing, where everything can be contextually correct, and more aware of what a good life actually means, and that it can mean different things for different people, and trying to figure out, tease out the elements needed to achieve that. For myself, that stopped being about the way I looked, or the numbers in my bank account, and more about direct experience, human connection, understanding people and maybe helping them to stop being their own enemies and being stuck in self-destructive circles.
Not that physiology is easy or simple, but it’s just so messy and complex that I just came to peace with probably never understanding it completely because it’s so intricate.
Ari: I’ll say just one thing very briefly on that. Having interviewed over 500 different health experts, I can say very confidently at this point that everyone, no matter how deep their knowledge and expertise, even the most brilliant people in some areas, inevitably always have some big blind spots. There’s nobody that I have encountered that comes anywhere remotely close to knowing everything about everything when it comes to health science.
Borge: Yes, that’s good to know. I have the same experience just talking to people where they’re experts in their respective fields, but everyone is just figuring stuff out as they go on some things. That was just a long-winded answer to I just find psychology and our thinking and our perceptions deeply fascinating. I’m just really curious about the whole mind-body experience where what is a placebo effect? What is a nocebo effect? The power of belief and power of perspective and how shifting that and creating identities can just be transforming to people’s lives way more than their daily habits in terms of how much protein they’re eating or how many sets of bicep curls they’re doing.
How social media affects our psyche
Ari: I think your journey and mine are not dissimilar in many ways, and I think they’re shared by probably a huge number of people in terms of our culture’s pursuit of physique aesthetics. Many young men grow up, and certainly women too, with different aesthetic and beauty standards. There’s an obvious parallel there as well. In the male circles, it’s this focus on being huge and being ripped and, of course, there’s the element, which you also spoke to, of pursuit of money and wealth. It’s interesting, to look at these things from an evolutionary perspective because there was a time for most of human history where we just had to compare ourselves to our tribe.
That social comparison game was very simple and straightforward. Now it’s become really, truly a no-win game. No matter how you get to the extremes of wealth, you can have tens of billions of dollars, but there’s always a bunch of people that have more money than you and have more private jets than you and more mansions all over the world than you and all that sort of stuff. Even with that level of extreme wealth, you can still have a sense of inadequacy and deep inferiority. You never arrive to a place where you’re like, okay, yes, now that I’ve finally got all this money, now I truly feel happy and successful. Because if you play that social comparison game, you just never arrive there.
The same is true with physique, certainly. There’s a genetic component to it as well, which we can’t even do anything about. There’s other people who inevitably have prettier genetics than us, where their muscle insertions cause their muscles to pop, or their waist is like this, or their abs are separated in this way, or genetically they’re leaner and more ripped naturally, or they have broader shoulders or whatever it is. There’s always somebody who’s bigger or stronger and more ripped than you are, no matter how hard you try. I tried for many years. I still train hard, but I’m not deeply in that world of desperately needing to be the most muscular and most ripped guy around.
That game is further complicated, not only by genetics, not only by how extreme you’re training, but also by chemical enhancement through steroids. It was a very sad realization for me in my mid-20s where I had fantasies of looking like a pro bodybuilder, to realize, oh, yes, you can only really achieve that by starting to inject a whole bunch of steroids. As tempting as that was at a certain point in my life in my early and mid-20s, I thankfully never did it. No matter how far you go down those paths, you can always feel inferior, and you can always be depressed that so many other people are ahead of where you are.
Borge: Oh, yes, for sure. There are many benefits with social media. Let’s not throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. It’s good for entertainment. We have access to information that we never did before and information will spread way faster than before, but there are also many downsides to it. Just like you said, we used to, for millennia and even tens and thousands of years, live in smaller tribes where we only had the closest 50 to maybe 100 people to compare ourselves with or relate to. Now we’re bombarded with images and impulses from the entire world at our fingertips just by scrolling on the phone.
Ari: We have to compare ourselves to billions of people now and the most genetically gifted people, the most chemically enhanced people, and not to mention Photoshop.
Borge: For sure, and AI.
Ari: People might take 20 photos and then post only the best one and then maybe use filters and Photoshop this little part of it in a subtle way. Then we’re playing this social comparison game in a way that we’re not even comparing ourselves against real images of real people at that point.
Borge: Let’s not forget that people lie. Even when it comes to success and wealth and marketing and sales, people claiming to have achieved this or that and five, six, seven, eight, nine figures, whatever, it’s all the way from completely made up to just basically, well, I managed to do this in a snapshot of time. Now I claim to have achieved that as a lifetime accomplishment and extrapolate. I feel that pressure myself sometimes to exaggerate things because social proof, how do you get traction these days? It’s increasingly hard to get exposure and get in front of people that you actually want to speak to.
I can certainly understand how it’s way easier, but also more difficult because the organizations and people behind these social media algorithms want you to pay for stuff. They want you to do them a service and bring people on their platforms and keep them there. It’s this constant pressure to entertain and perform and deliver and provide value constantly. It can be overwhelming for many people, including myself. We see that in the statistics now with increasing rates of depression and anxiety in youth. I think it’s perhaps time we start to wake up to our new modern world and how can we actually prepare our children and adolescents for what’s to come.
The illusion of Optimal
Ari: Yes. You had a wonderful article that you wrote recently called The Illusion of Optimal. I want to read a little section of it because it’s so well-written.
You said, “Scrolling through any social media platform, I admit to still catching myself doom scrolling once in a while. Every influencer seems to have cracked the code to an ideal life. From secret morning routines they learn from Tibetan monks to meticulously planned diets, magical supplements and business strategies, the message is clear, follow these steps and you too can achieve ultimate success and happiness. However, this pursuit of the optimal often masks the nuanced realities of individual experiences creating an unattainable standard that leaves most feeling inadequate. I know I did. Here’s the truth. Social media is a game of engagement, and this often requires that you fake it till you make it. A lot of the health and efficiency improvements, revenue numbers, and client successes are often inflated and sometimes entirely made up. I think we’ve all witnessed how someone with hundreds of thousands of followers went from evangelical promotion of weird diets to changing their stance as their previous health improvements started reversing and even deteriorating. The vegan influencer crying openly on camera and admitting to eating meat again. The carnivore influencer enthusiastically binging on honey and fruits while still clinging to the moniker animal-based. My goal isn’t to discredit them, it’s to remind you of the importance of authenticity, honesty, and the willingness to embrace experimentation in our lives. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.”
I love what you wrote there, and I’m wondering if you can elaborate a bit on it and what inspired it.
Borge: Yes, I guess just talking to people that are behind some of these bigger accounts and observing the game. I’m not going to drop any names, but I’m fairly certain that just reading that out loud, some will know [crosstalk].
Ari: There’s certainly some names that sprung up in my mind.
Borge: Yes, exactly, and I think most will have the same thoughts about that. I’ve seen them defend themselves and say that, well, it’s just my evolution and learning, and shouldn’t I be sharing that? I’m like, well, yes, for sure, but you demonized what you’re now eating, what you’re now doing, and saying that was dangerous and unhealthy. Perhaps some humility. I know that the algorithms reward those who make some strong statements and use these really big words, but perhaps it should be a reminder that next time try to not be so dogmatic about it and create this dichotomous split. At least when it comes to nutrition, that seems to be almost like a religion to most people. In the training world I see the same thing, but nutrition is just like a minefield.
Ari: Yes, and I think the way that you phrase this and even what in your writing and what you said just now is all very charitable in the sense that it’s fairly clear to me that many of the people who are involved in what you’re alluding to here are not doing it genuinely and authentically. They don’t even believe what they’re saying. They are knowingly cherry picking and distorting the evidence to basically promote a particular narrative because it’s polarizing, because it’s extreme, because it gets them attention and gets them traction, makes them money ultimately. Then, from my observations, I feel the cognitive dissonance of that eventually eats away at their soul so much.
Some of these people, I think, are just sociopaths and maybe they don’t even have a conscience where they don’t feel bad about any of doing that. They’re very comfortable manipulating people into pseudoscience and nonsense to make money. I think some of them have enough cognitive dissonance that maybe they start to come out and, in their way, instead of really admitting they were wrong, it’s like, “Well, now I’ve started to change my approach to this, this and this.”
Really what they know inside is that, yes, they were a fraud. They were a charlatan. They were promoting a bunch of nonsense to make money. They were ignoring and distorting the evidence all along. It’s like a child’s behavior. It’s like when you’re caught doing something wrong and you come up with every excuse and rationalization to try to avoid acknowledging that you did anything wrong.
Borge: Oh, yes, definitely. Listen to a podcast with Robert Greene or read some of his 48 Laws of Power. He’s got these brilliant observations about human nature and manipulation. Basically, well, it can teach you how to manipulate others. Most of all, I think it really taught me how to spot these people and the strategies they use to get what they want. It doesn’t matter if they do it on purpose or if it’s some subconscious learned behavior that they have just seen throughout their lives by saying this and doing that, they get what they want much easier. It’s still something to just watch out for and stop falling for. I know that I did several times, but the more I dug into stuff, because again, I’m a first principles guy, even question my own beliefs. I try to disprove myself all the time. What if the opposite perspective is true? Once I started doing that with some of these charlatans, then it became very obvious that tey’re-
Ari: That they don’t engage in that.
Borge: -blatantly lying. Either stupid or blatantly lying. I don’t know which is worse.
Ari: Yes. They’re both really bad. [chuckles] They’re both really bad. I think stupidity is more forgivable though.
Borge: Yes, sure. The Mount Stupid thing again. You should keep learning and evolving and eventually, catch up to your own bullshit, I think. Some don’t seem to be doing that.
Stay Authentic
Ari: Agreed, yes. One of the other things that you wrote about is authenticity, honesty, and self-experimentation. You quoted somebody who was one of my childhood idols, Bruce Lee, in his quote, “Absorb what is useful, discard what is useless, and add what is distinctly your own.” Describe to people how you conceptualize that. That realm of honesty, authenticity, self-experimentation.
Borge: That’s probably the hardest thing you can do. Stay authentic. I know I tried to, and I ended up fooling myself instead of fooling others by insisting on believing stuff that I deep down knew wasn’t true. The only thing that provided peace of mind for me was to admit my mistakes and be honest with people. Whether it’s my soul’s purpose or just destiny or whatever, whenever I tried to, move into the gray zone, gray areas, or even distort or twist the truth, it just slapped me in the face really hard every single time. Instead of carrying around that shame, I just figured out, well, the best way is just owning up to my mistakes.
Sometimes being able to say that I don’t really know, this is what I think but I’m not really sure because this and that, and that’s all I can offer. Realizing that sometimes that’s more what people want to hear instead of you saying that, well, I’m the expert. I know everything, you’re wrong. Everyone else is wrong. Instead of telling people what to do, it’s more of this is what I did. That’s what worked for me. Also, why I started to become really skeptical of all of the prescriptions and advice out there for achieving success, because I tried some of them and they didn’t work for me at that time in my context.
I realized, well, perhaps we should switch our focus into providing tools and learnings and perspectives so that people can figure stuff out for themselves. That was way more productive and successful to me and my clients that let’s start exploring how we can make things work better for you. I stopped answering questions of the type of what should I do? Is this right or wrong? Instead, well, here’s a stepwise process that you can experiment with to figure out what works best for you. We see this in plenty of psychological research as well.
When you provide people with flexibility instead of rigid routines, it’s more sustainable for them. It’s a higher chance of them actually being able to implement it as habits in their lives. That’s the way I see things. Maybe we should stop being so obsessed about finding that one perfect solution for everything because to me, it’s like having a hammer and everything just looks like nails. Let’s try to adopt more of a flexible, contextual, personal approach to living a good life.
The importance of educating yourself
Ari: Let me push back on what you’re saying here in one way and maybe we’ll get into some gray area here. I don’t think it’s that you actually disagree with me, but I think that there’s something worth exploring here. I think, you correct me if I’m wrong, but I would bet based on the way you’re talking, the demographic that you work with is generally people who have already had maybe years of experience in fitness and training and trying to grow bigger muscles, lose fat, optimize their body composition. Would you say that’s accurate for the most part?
Borge: I would say it’s across the whole spectrum. It used to be that way, but now I do tend to get clients that have already tried to achieve success with their training or dieting perspectives.
Ari: Okay, well, so let me be more direct. Here’s what I’m getting at. In order to get to the point where I think you can do self-experimentation intelligently and productively, you have to have, in my view, a fairly solid grounding in knowledge, in actual real scientific understanding of that thing. As an example, just to take this to an extreme, if you took somebody who was, let’s say 40, 50 years old, extremely overweight, has never taken a nutrition course or read a book on nutrition in their life, knows nothing about nutritional science, and you said, well, just self-experiment and see what you can do to lose fat, right? You and I know that’s not going to go very well. The self-experimentation has to be built on top of some foundation of actual knowledge and expertise, right?
Borge: Oh, yes, completely agree. I’m sorry if that was missing from my statements there, but what I was getting at is that there’s no single gram of protein or perfect amount of vegetables to eat every day. It’s more of a range. I completely agree that we should, first of all, start to educate people of this is probably not good for you to have a lot of, but this is usually better for you. Within that range of what’s good and scientifically validated to be good for us, then whether you’re at the higher end or the lower end of that is up to you. That’s why I said I give people tools to figure out themselves what works for them, but it’s not like, well, you just go out there and try whatever. I don’t give a shit. The tools is the knowledge. This is generally what’s accepted as being good for us.
You probably know this as well as I do that from an evolutionary perspective, we can probably assume that what humans have been eating through millennia is closer to the truth than the modern ultra-processed versions of it. That’s the overarching framework. The same thing goes with training. Yes, you need to lift heavy weights and you need to go out there and run and cover distance if you want to build endurance. Within that, it’s more like, well, start here and then try to go in that direction in terms of training volume or distance or intensity of effort and see how that works for you. If you push in that direction and you get better, then you have an answer. If you push in that direction and you get worse, well, then perhaps we should try going in this direction instead. That’s what I was getting at.
Ari: Yes. As you were talking there, I was conceptualizing two people. I know through personal experience, I’ve interacted with many of these types in both directions that I’m about to describe. I would say there’s two ends of this spectrum. You could conceptualize one person on one end of the spectrum who wants to know everything about everything and follow every particular rule down to the finest nuance and is organizing their whole day and their whole schedule and their whole life around, all these specific routines to be optimal and doing whatever they’re told and just following the rules blindly of whatever, taking these ideas promoted by people like you and me and other teachers and people who are writing books and so on and taking them as gospel and saying, “I must adhere to these rules exactly as outlined by Ari and Borge,” without ever engaging in self-experimentation and finding what works for them.
On the other hand, I’ve also had the experience, I would say more commonly, the experience of people who have very little knowledge and think that they know enough to guide their own path and they think they’ve got it all figured out and I’ve witnessed people just be stuck for years and years and years, insisting that they know best and they have the right way and nobody else can guide them because they’re the only ones who know the right path to fix whatever’s going on for them.
Borge: It’s like they’re on Mount Stupid.
Ari: Right. Yes, exactly. I just witnessed, oh my gosh, a little bit of humility and willingness to learn and change your approach based on expert guidance would be so enormously helpful for you.
Borge: Yes. Yes, it’s like, again, back to Keegan’s model of psychological development where you have the child and, a lot of spiritual leaders and, we admire children because they have so much fun and joy and happiness through direct experience. That’s because they still haven’t grown up yet. They’re not adults yet. We go through these psychological development stages where we begin to learn and understand more and begin to have thoughts about our thinking and perceptions. Through the stages where you go through, where you add knowledge and understand things, it’s easy to get stuck or just the person you described there believing they know everything and there’s nothing more to learn and they have the full understanding.
That type of client requires a different approach. I have created an entire coaching certification that I will begin teaching now this autumn. We try to identify what type of client we have and what type of approach that client needs. Some needs a more authoritative approach where you tell them what to do and guide them so that they begin to evolve and learn and understand in order for them to develop their own philosophy. You also have those that are called, let’s call it self-authoring mind, where they’re capable of questioning their own beliefs.
Perhaps like the first person you described being maybe too stuck in too much information and overwhelmed and they need to narrow down things. They need to learn how to stop ruminating and overthinking so much. Yes, it’s definitely both an art and a science here. The art of coaching is to try to figure out what type of client or person you have in front of you and then design a strategy to improve that person’s life, to make them feel better about what they’re doing. Yes, I completely agree with everything you said. It needs to be tailored to the individual.
Forget Biohacking, Embrace Simplicity
Ari: You wrote another article titled, Forget Biohacking, Embrace Simplicity. This speaks to a bit of what we were just speaking about, that example person who’s overthinking, who’s got way too much information and, just making everything way more complex than it needs to be. This is really a mindset shift, I think, for many people. How would you describe this idea or what did you intend? What’s the core message you intended behind this idea of forgetting biohacking and shifting to the mindset of embracing simplicity?
Borge: Very often when I write I’m writing to myself, a younger version of myself what I would have liked to be told 2 to 10 years ago depending. This is precisely that person struggling with overwhelm and information overload, where everything is about tricking and hacking and shortcuts.
The very best way to learn is to try to teach others, but the best way to learn is actually to try stuff out and figure out, again, the Bruce Lee philosophy. Absorb what is useful and discard what is not and add what is uniquely your own, figure out for yourself what truly works. I’m all for all of these meditation routines and ice bathing and supplements and dietary strategies or whatever, but instead of thinking that there’s going to be this one ultimate solution, then it’s more a process of eliminating instead of adding. At least you need to get to a certain point where you eliminate more than you add. It’s that minimalism, essentialist mindset.
Because putting effort into one direction instead of spreading it out into 10 different directions is probably going to move the needle more for you and your progress. That’s basically what I was trying to get at that so many people are trying to– It’s like studying tennis. You could sit there and read books about tennis, the history of tennis, great tennis players, you could watch YouTube videos, you could study the material of tennis rackets and equipment, but you’re never going to learn tennis unless you go out there and actually practice the game and figure out if you enjoy it in the first place. That’s where, again, speaking to myself, I could spend so much time theorizing and understanding it conceptually.
When I started to apply it to myself, my own life and my own body, didn’t turn out so well always. Sometimes it turned out better. I could never know that unless I actually tried. Sometimes I needed to do something completely different for it to actually work and always be curious and questioning the context and, perhaps outside variables and factors. Just to end on that note that my biggest strength has been my ability to synthesize a large amount of information and provide practical applications and solutions. That has also been my burden because having that as my strength led me into overthinking and ruminating and having periods of time where I just couldn’t shut off my brain at all. I’ll just hit a wall and exhausted myself and burnt out completely. It’s again, an article that I wish I had perhaps read a few years ago.
Ari: You and me both in that way, and, going back to our original encounter of how we met was basically arguing over the research of how nutrition interfaces with circadian rhythm, which is a good example of us both overthinking all the details of that.
Borge: Exactly.
Ari: Granted, to be a little charitable to us at the time, the research was very limited and some of it was conflicting, so it was hard to make sense of in a way that you could gel and reconcile all the different studies to come up with some conclusion. It’s interesting you mentioned tennis a minute ago because in my head, right as you were talking, before you mentioned tennis, I was thinking of tennis because I started playing tennis two years ago.
As you were describing, simplifying and removing things, for me that’s exactly what tennis was in my own life because I have a stationary bike set up in my garage to do zone two cardio and I was doing high intensity interval training and all this stuff the way that, a typical exercise science expert would organize their training routines. Over time playing tennis, I started to realize, whoa, I’m really getting a pretty amazing workout from tennis in terms of endurance, in terms of cardiovascular system, in terms of high intensity intervals and sprints. Not only that, but it’s way more fun.
I’m smiling way more. I’m playing, I’m playing a game. I’m competing. There’s a fear component when I play against, for example, my tennis coaches and they’re much better at tennis than me. Now I have all this other mental side of the game that I’m training. There’s a whole agility element that I’m training so much more, as far as different changes of direction and speed and agility and rotational movements, things that I wouldn’t get training on a stationary bike.
I started to realize, wow, actually if I could really simplify my life so much by just getting rid of so much of this other training that I’m doing, which is just fatiguing me and overtraining me and just playing tennis one more time a week. I’ll still get, even if I don’t have the precise number of minutes in zone two or whatever, you and I know from really understanding exercise science at a deep level that I’m going to get 90% plus of the benefits overall of those adaptations anyway by playing tennis frequently at a high level.
Borge: And 100% of the enjoyment.
Ari: Yes. For me, that was a great example of simplifying and making my life simpler and less complex and more fun all at the same time.
Borge: Perfect example. Yes. I love that story. That’s exactly what I was getting at.
Ari: Yes. Borge, I have to run right now to my next call, but I know we have so much more to talk about and, there’s a whole bunch more on my list of things I want to talk about. I want to do a part three with you. I’ll reach out to you to schedule that. Maybe we can record in the next few days or next week. I would love to continue this conversation. I know you have much more wisdom to share.
Borge: Thank you. I appreciate it. It was a fantastic conversation again.
Ari: Likewise. 100%. To wrap up, let people know where they can find you, what services and programs and products you offer and where you want to direct them.
Borge: I’m mostly active on Instagram these days. Less active now since I’m finishing up the Myo Reps ebook finally. That’s going to be published soon, but my website Borgefagerli.com is probably the best way to reach me and read about my services. I offer one-on-one coaching and online courses, eventually.
Ari: Great. Just spell your website for people. We’ll have the link below for people watching on YouTube or on the website. If you’re listening to this on Spotify or iTunes or something like that, just spell out the website for people.
Borge: Yes. It’s B-O-R-G-E-F-A-G-E-R-L-I dot com.
Ari: Borge, awesome, such a pleasure. I look forward to the next conversation and keeping this flowing.
Borge: Yes, me too, man. Thank you.
Ari: All right, talk to you soon, my friend.
Borge: Bye-bye.
Show Notes
00:00 Intro
00:55 – The Dunning-Kruger effect
12:53 – How social media affects our psyche
20:00 – The illusion of Optimal
27:12 – Stay Authentic
31:26 – The importance of educating yourself
40:09 – Forget Biohacking, Embrace Simplicity
Links
Recommended Podcasts
