Dr. Eric Cobb Welcome to the Fat-Loss Summit again. I hope you re excited for this interview. Today we re talking with Dr. Eric Cobb, who is an amazing human being, one of the smartest chiropractic physicians I have ever known. I m privileged to call him my good friend, and I m also very excited that he s really the one who is responsible for bringing my shoulder back to life. I had a shoulder injury from playing too much tennis, whereby I got to the point where I could no longer hold my racket because of a lot of the neurological stuff that was going on. He showed me four exercises that I did over the space of two days, and the third day I played four hours of tennis with no problem. Since then, I ve used these exercises on a regular basis. His real unique ability in terms of what he teaches is how to use neurology, the movement of neurology, and how to use our body from a neurological perspective to create amazing change in the human body. He s worked with professional athletes, Special Forces, you name it. He s actually a former professional tennis player himself, which is pretty cool. What s amazing is that he s taken these concepts of neurology and how, for instance, the way you use your eyes or the way you move your head or the way you move in the world can actually help your body lose weight. How would eyesight help us lose weight? It s amazing stuff. In and above all that cool stuff, what we re going to be talking about today specifically is how to use those same neurological mechanisms to understand how to create lasting habits. If you want to lose weight, it s not about losing weight and putting it back on. You want to lose weight so that it s gone for good. What Eric is going to show you today, he s going to give you a lot of the most recent research as it pertains to creating habits that stick. We re going to go into the science, we re going to go into the practical applications of this. I think you ll really, really enjoy this interview. Without any further ado, let s bring Dr. Eric Cobb into the hot seat, and let s dive right in. Yuri: All right, guys, I m really excited to be joined by my good friend Dr. Eric Cobb in this special Fat-Loss Summit interview. Welcome. How s it going? Eric: I m doing really well, man. Thanks for the invitation. Yuri: Absolutely. It s always good to connect with you. You re probably one of the smartest, wisest men or women that I know when it comes to performance, the human body. It s incredible. I m really excited to have you share some of your unique approaches and perspectives to the whole fat-loss equation. 1
We ve talked a lot about exercise and diet and hormones and stuff, but I think you really bring a unique perspective, which is more of the neurology that not a lot of people think about. Can you tell our audience really quickly your journey from, you were a pro tennis player and worked with combat units and stuff and how all of this has led to where you are now? Eric: Well, first of all, thank you. That was a very nice intro. It s been kind of a strange journey. I was interviewed last night, and the guy I was talking to, we got in this kind of long discussion about backgrounds. One of the things that I ve learned as I ve gotten older is that I look at any system that develops, and, obviously, it takes on a little bit of the character of the developer. You can look at what they re doing and think a little bit about their background. Kind of putting it really simply, I always tell people I was born with two passions: fighting and fitness. I think that probably came out of some brain damage or something that happened, because I was a really sick kid. I was one of these classically hospitalized for a couple years, actually, for a variety of birth defects. As the story goes, I tell people I really got into exercise and fitness and then medicine basically to fix myself. I was really trying to figure out how to be a better athlete, but I also had chronic pain, daily pain, for a lot of years. I deal with a lot of athletes, a lot of individuals, and one of the most common things I hear is, I feel like for the amount of work I m doing, I should better. I was one of those classic people of, I was a really disciplined dude. I did my training, I did the things that, in general, people were recommending we do. I got very low results. I would be what a lot of people would classify as a low responder or non-responder in a lot of cases, now that we re putting classifications around things in the exercise world. I really went on a long journey of trying to understand why that might be. My first entrance into all of this was very much biomechanical, with some flavorings of neurology. I was telling someone recently, they were asking about vision training because we do a lot of vision work and inner-ear work in what we do. I said I actually started doing vision training when I was 11 or 12 because I read an article about Björn Borg and I was a tennis player and he was the best guy in the world. I m like, What does he do? he was doing these strange vision exercises. I m like, Well, I m going to do that because he s doing it, so it should work. I tell people I ve kind of followed an intuitive approach to what I ve done over the years and, over time, tried to perform it with better information and better science. As I said, I kind of went down this biomechanical path for a really long time. Honestly, biomechanics are important, but they are not the end all, be all that we were taught that they were in school, particularly when it comes to getting people out of pain, improving performance. Through frustration and not creating results with people with myself particularly, and then with patients and athletes that then took me into another journey of probably the past 20 years of really trying to dig in to the neuroscience of movement. What s come out of that is the education system that we have, but, really, I think a deeper appreciation of the uniqueness of people: why some individuals are hyper-responsive to anything they do, why some people really struggle. 2
I think the perspective that we bring to fat loss or really to anything is, first of all, an individualized process. It has to be kind of at the top of the mind for most people. There s a lot of theory behind all that I m happy to go into if you want, but that s basically how I got here. Yuri: Nice. And just for all of our viewers and listeners, one of the first times we met was at a mastermind meeting, and I was telling you about some shoulder pain that I had from tennis. You gave me about four exercises that I did for the following two days. Previous to that, I wasn t able to play tennis for more than, I don t know, half a set before my hand started losing feeling. A couple days after you showed me those exercises, I played four hours of tennis with no problem. To this day, I still do the exercises all the time. Z-Health is the company you and Kathy run, and it s just an incredible platform for really empowering people to understand how the body operates more so than just, as you mentioned, biomechanics. You guys work with pro athletes and all sorts of amazing people. It s really amazing. You talked about vision, which is really interesting because vision is one of those things a lot of people don t think about. How does vision impact performance? It s kind of everything because it s a big sense for how we take in the world. What I d like to get into is, we live in this paradigm within the fat-loss world of, I m going to lose weight, so, therefore, I m going to burn X number of calories and eat a little bit less. Is that a broken model? What are you seeing as a more efficient or more effective way of losing weight sustainably? Eric: This is actually one of my very favorite topics to talk about, so if I start rambling, just stop me. Yuri: We ll rope you back in. Eric: Pull me back in. The first answer I ll give is: Everything around the fat-loss model is, to some degree, broken, yes. When we look at this statistically, less than 5 percent of dieters are able to maintain weight loss for any sustained period of time. In the research literature, what we see are people talking about the honeymoon phase. The honeymoon phase of any diet is 6 to 12 months and, regardless of the style of diet if it s Paleo or whatever people are doing these days people lose weight. Now, the reason that most people lose weight in the honeymoon phase is because they re doing something different, and they re bringing an awareness to their eating that they probably haven t had in a long time maybe they re making different food choices, et cetera. Ultimately, what we do know is that most diets work, and the reason they work is because you re ingesting less food or fewer calories than you were previously. Like I said, I don t fall into any I m kind of what they call a food agnostic. People always ask me if I believe in this or this or this. We have to figure out what works for you. One of the biggest challenges in the fat-loss process or building a sustainable eating behavior is that it has to fit into your life. 3
Most of the people that we deal with are real human beings. They re not professional athletes; they re moms with three teenage kids and whoever; they re tasked with preparing the food. When you start to deal with a lot of these real-life issues, what you start to understand is that the behavior and not just individualized behavior but environmental behavior really shapes success in most cases when it comes to making any kind of sustainable change. We have a couple different approaches to this. The eat-less-move-more model kind of works, but, for most people, it s not showing any kind of long-term sustainability. The focus tends to be on short-term results rather than building habitual processes that will lead to long-term benefit. We have that issue. The other issue that we also have is that most people don t recognize that exercise and food supplementation can all be looked at in some ways as a drug. When it comes to choosing exercise, you want to think, If I have a headache, I don t want to take a blood pressure pill unless my headache is being caused by blood pressure medication and I m not getting into whether you should be taking meds anyway. The whole idea is that we know, in medicine, we have to match the condition with the appropriate therapy. If I give you the right drug at a too-small dose, it doesn t work, and if I give you the right drug at too high of a dose, it might kill you. Everything in the fat-loss world really needs to be looked at from that perspective. Right now, the popular approach to weight loss leads to the exercise industry; it s high-intensity work. Everyone has kind of moved away from slow, boring, or what they call LSD long, slow distance cardio work. Everyone wants to get more benefit for less time. If they re going to do four minutes of work or eight minutes of work and supposedly get this amazing post-exercise burn, which everyone doesn t burn nearly as much as most people think. It s a cool marketing thing, but it doesn t really do that much. The thing people don t understand is that they re physically compromised already, for whatever reason; like we were talking about maybe either eyes or inner ear or movement patterns are really disturbed. High-intensity exercise can actually threaten them at such a level that not only do they not create the benefits they re looking for, but they can wind up causing a worsening hormonal profile. Yuri: Just based on a stress response of the body? Eric: Yeah, just a stress response. We see it all the time. It s almost classic in the gym industry, where people start working out, they re getting a benefit, they re losing weight, and they re like, okay, well more must be better. Then they go harder and longer, and what happens is you see the weight coming back on. Now they re stuck in this loop of, Oh my gosh! I need to eat even less and work even harder. They get in this very strange, vicious cycle. A lot of times, what we have to do is say one of the big mind-set shifts we try to get people to understand is that, very often, you need to get healthy in order to lose weight. A lot of people don t have that concept because what s been preached at them for the past 30 years is: Lose weight; you ll be healthy. It doesn t often work that way. 4
Yuri: It s fascinating. We ve had so many discussions on a lot of people, as you ve said, try diets and different workout programs, but, for whatever reason, it s not working. For the most part, it s a physiological thing, right? For most people, 30 different diets might work, but if they re not responding, probably something internally isn t working right. You mentioned non-responders and hyper-responders, people who show great results or improvements with input to diet or exercise, whereas others don t. Is there a way to turn a nonresponder or a low responder into more of a hyperr-esponder? Or is that kind of a set thing? Eric: That s a really cool question because this is kind of how I described my work. My job is to take non-responders and turn them into super-responders if possible. I think there are a lot of different routes you can follow. The number one rule I would keep going back to is: If you re trying to become a super responder to a diet or exercise program at the most foundational level, we have to know what your current health status is. We can take someone who let me just use a simple example. The difference between being a low or non-responder to being a super responder for some individuals is just how much they re training. Meaning there are some individuals who need maybe two hours a week of training to get great response. You push them to five or six hours a week, and all of a sudden, their results start to tank because it s too much stress. Then you have the inverse of that as well. At this point in science, there s no easy way for us go, Hey, here s a blood best to tell us how you re going to respond. As I said, a lot of the stuff is so individualized based on other things that you have going on. The way that you work with your clients and your audience I ve always appreciated because you take a very holistic approach. Whenever I say holistic a lot of people have this kind pejorative, like, woo-woo alternative, and that s not the case at all. The human body is holistic. The brain influences the body, the body influences the brain. Whenever we re starting to go, How do I take a non-responder and turn them into a superresponder? I want to understand a lot of things about them, what their current stress level is. Does that make a difference? Absolutely it does. If I ve got a 45-year-old guy who s going through a divorce and a job change, he s probably an insomniac as a result of his stress. Because he s not sleeping, anything that I m doing to him physically is going to be far more stressful. That s the guy who may need one or two hours of harder exercise per week. Maybe his main fat-loss goal right now is learning to meditate or do something to help his generalized health. This is kind of that crazy, I don t know what you d call it, quicksand that you run into when you re trying to help individuals on a big scale, because there are so many different factors that come into play. 5
Yuri: I got a blog comment the other day on my blog. It was an article I d written about jumping rope versus running, which was better for whatever. This person commented and said, I ve been skipping rope and running, and I ve actually gained weight over the past couple weeks. I was like, That s very unusual. May I suggest there might be other factors in your life that are contributing to that? Most likely, it s not the skipping or running that s going to make you gain weight. We do have to take a very holistic approach. I appreciate you saying the sleep and the stress, because those are really, really important things we don t think about because we re so much in this calories in-calories out type of mentality. They re so impactful. Eric: When you start to look at something like sleep, there s so much research now around sleep. People ask me all the time how much they should sleep, et cetera. I go, Well, that we don t know for sure, but what we do know is that we need a lot of restful sleep. Whenever we actually are able to identify that that s a problem, the impact of poor sleep has huge ramifications throughout the body and, very importantly in the fat-loss arena, metabolically. What we ll tend to see over a period of time is that as people s sleep degrades, their base-level metabolic rate decreases. Now, all of a sudden, their calorie burn, if you want to call it that, throughout the day is diminishing to the point that they may be exercising 30 minutes to an hour a day just to keep up with where they used to be before their sleep became deranged or disturbed. Like I said, there are so many different little aspects that go into it. That was just a thought that was prompted by that. You see someone skipping rope and running and you re thinking that should be enough and their weight s going up, a really good guess something else is at play. Yuri: Yeah. If you re watching this and you re the individual who left the comment, hopefully this gives you some insight. I love the work that you do because it s so awesome. We talked about intuitive training, which we can talk about in a second. I want to start off with your whole approach to human performance, which is really like it starts in the brain. How does our brain help our body shed weight and maintain a healthy weight? What is that whole connection there? Eric: This is another big topic. Yuri: Volume one. Eric: Volume one, yeah. If I start off with real basics, let me say this: Right now this science is still emerging. No one out there can honestly say that they know exactly how weight is regulated in the body. I know this comes across weird when people hear me talk all the time. A lot of people proclaim themselves as nutritional experts, or the media proclaims them as nutritional experts or nutritional authorities. To be honest, I don t think any of us know enough to actually be considered that right now. I believe all of us are nutritional scientists. 6
A good scientist is basically saying, Hey, this is what we can see. This is what we can test in a lab. Let s blend it, let s actually run experiments which is called working with clients and figure out what works. There are some theories out there. We start to talk about fat loss or weight regulation from a brain-base perspective, we know that there s a lot of conversation going on between the first brain, which is the brain that s in your skull, and what a lot of people call your second brain, which is called the enteric nervous system. Basically, what we know now is that there are billions of neurons the basic operating cell of the brain is a neuron there are billions of them in the gut as well. We are just now starting to try and understand and figure out how these two brains are talking to one another to control weight and metabolism and everything else. The most basic level I try and get people to understand is that the human body has what people call a homeostatic process. In other words, wherever you re at, your brain really likes to keep you there because change, either going up or down, requires energy. The way that we talk about this with our clients is saying, Your brain is primarily concerned about survival, first and foremost. All of its software is, in essence, designed to keep you right where you re at. To lose weight requires mental energy, it requires physical energy. To gain weight actually also requires effort. This is why we see, while, yes, people gain weight over time, if you statistically look at most adults over the age of 30, between 30 and 40, most people will gain somewhere between one to five pounds a year over 20 or 30 years. That s when you line up people who are actually becoming obese. If you think about that, that s a really long period of time of that to happen. From our perspective, what we re always trying to do, we re looking at the brain from a lot of different perspectives, saying, How can we most easily help the brain make the shifts that it needs to create the result we re looking for? This is, to some degree, why we talk about the eyes, about the inner ear, about your basic movement patterns. All of those things actually do contribute and this, again, sounds strange to people who haven t heard this before. All of these different functions actually contribute to your hormonal status. Most people are familiar with this idea that hormones play a role in weight regulation, et cetera, so poorly functioning brains tend to have poorly functioning hormonal systems attached to them. Yuri: That would make sense. Eric: It becomes this weird chicken-or-the-egg kind of question. We try and approach it from both perspectives. I ve always been very much brain-driven because, to me, the brain is a control center. Is that enough of an intro? Yuri: Yeah, for sure. I think it makes sense too. For everyone watching or listening, pretty much all hormones, for the most part, begin in the brain: hypothalamus, pituitary gland. We see a lot of women, for instance, with thyroid issues. The medical solution is, let s just give you some thyroid medication, which is really only dealing with the gland and not other issues in the body. Maybe there s a conversion problem, or maybe there s a problem up here, which the medication is not going to address. 7
As you said, it s a very holistic approach to really investigate into what s happening. It would be nice if it was just as easy as eat less, move more, but it s a little bit more complex. Eric: Absolutely it is. Yuri: What are you seeing in terms of interventions? Your new thing is looking at habits and things that are going to lead to lasting change. What are some really big needle movers that you re noticing now that people can implement into their lives or think about to move them from where they are now to where they want to be and really keep them at that healthy weight for as long as possible? Eric: Cool, great question. This is where I like to shift focus a little bit and say most people, if we were to sit and just have a conversation over coffee or tea or whatever they re drinking that day, I would say, What do you feel like you should be eating? Most people would go, Well, I would have Maybe they re vegetarian or whatever, but most are going to say some meat, some vegetables, some fruit, and occasionally maybe at a birthday party, a slice of cheesecake. Awesome, right? That s perfect. We really don t need to go a lot further than that. The problem is, most people don t enact what they already know. This is where I really think we have to start shifting the needle toward behavior and habits. One of the things that s come out very clearly in research and this sounds ridiculously silly to say it out loud right now, most of the diet industry spends a lot of its time either overtly or covertly shaming people by telling them that they just need to have greater willpower and more self-discipline in order to avoid the foods they should be avoiding to match their calories to their activity levels. As I said, when you go back and look at the research, the number one reason that diets fail is hunger, which seems ridiculously stupid, but people are hungry. We actually combine two things. One is, I tell people that hunger is a naturally occurring state. In fact, the way that I teach about nutrition is that human beings are basically always hungry; we just have temporary periods of decreased hunger when we eat or whatever. Hunger by itself is a survival thing. If you re never hungry, you re never going to tame nutrients to stay alive. Hunger is a baseline. This is one of the reasons that people struggle all the time. We give people lots of ideas, like you should be avoiding this food and this food and this food. But if they don t develop behavioral skills to deal with hunger, most diets will fail miserably. Yuri: Just to jump in there, what would be if somebody s hungry, first thing is: I m going to go to the fridge, open it up, and grab something. What would be an alternative, just a quick behavioral type of shift? Eric: So many different things come into this. The number one thing I try and get people to do is just recognize that most hunger signals are actually somewhat unconscious. You find yourself standing in front of the fridge or pantry without even knowing why you re there. And then you take a breath, and you re like, Oh, I feel a little hungry, and then you grab whatever. 8
What we try and get people to do, number one, is just start to have some awareness around what they re feeling. We ll do very simple things like take a Post-It note with a dot or something on it, put it on the handle of the fridge, put it on the pantry so when they walk up, that is a visual trigger to think about why they re there. Am I really hungry or am I bored? Am I frustrated? Am I angry? Honestly, we eat for lots of different reasons; everyone knows that. First thing I try to get people to do is have awareness and then notice they re actually reaching for food. And then any kind of alternative behavior can be useful. A lot of people recommend taking 60 seconds to just breathe, focus on your breathing. Take a quick walk around the block. There s a multitude of different distractors, and that s basically what it comes down to in the literature. Anything that distracts you for roughly somewhere between three and five minutes, those cravings you re having will most likely start to diminish. That s just a basic starting point. The much deeper conversation around all that is about environment. Hunger is the number one reason that diets fail, but then you also connect that to another concept called decision fatigue. What has come out of the literature very clearly is that willpower and self-control are just like any other attribute, meaning I can sprint for a certain period of time, and then I m exhausted. Well, you can make decisions and have good willpower for a certain period of time, and then that is exhausted; it is actually a physical skill that lives in the brain. What we talk a lot about with our clients is reorganizing their environments and reorganizing their calendars so that their most difficult eating decisions are made when they still have good decisionmaking energy, which is usually not at night and usually not after a long day of work. Classically speaking, I know almost no client who ever comes up to me and says, You know what, the most difficult time I have following my eating plan is in the morning at breakfast. I just can t turn down Yuri: That s when I m the least motivated. Eric: Never that. It s, I ve had a long day, the kids are sick, whatever. We talk a lot about environmental design. Personally, for me, there s a great book written years ago called, they talked about the five major food instincts. One of the things the researcher talked about was the whole idea of food availability. The simple idea is: If it s there and you re hungry and you have low willpower at that time, guess what, it s going in. For me, my number one diet plan is just not having food available. Yuri: Exactly. Eric: It s very, very simple. I tend to follow in my own eating a much more what I would call European model of shop daily, have very little food in the house. Then what I really want is overeating to be really inconvenient. There s a lot of stuff that starts to go into this whole idea of how I deal with hunger. The easiest way to deal with hunger is way before it begins. 9
Yuri: I totally agree with that. That s probably the most, out of all the stuff I ve done in terms of if I were to give advice to somebody, environment is so important. As you said, that whole willpower equation is just, I think everybody can relate to that. On a daily basis, they re dealing with the same thing. They re making decisions all throughout the day, they re resisting temptations, they re bombarded by all sorts of different stressors. We re basically, either consciously or unconsciously, trying to get all that stuff out so we can focus, and it s just, by the time the days end, we re just, All right, let s just order some pizza. Eric: You re exhausted and you re hungry. Yuri: Often those food choices are not the healthiest because you re looking for something to really just calm you down, so it may be more of a carbohydrate-rich dish like pizza or something else. It s very fascinating. Eric: Like I said, there is a lot of research around this. When we reach that decision-fatigue period because, basically, you re tired and, as you sad, you ve already exercised willpower throughout the day. Then we go through all these mental games of, well, I was really good at breakfast and lunch and those snacks. I did really good, so I really earned this. We have all these weird little mind games that we play. When you look at the research, like I said, what you ll see is that when people are then fatigued, given the choice between two different foods, they almost invariably will choose the richer, high-calorie, better-tasting food. This shows up in study after study after study. I think it s really time for the industry to stop blaming people so much about making better food choices and, instead, think they really have to help people shape their lives so that the food choices are made more automatically and in a better and healthier way. Yuri: I think the key word there is automatically. If we have done-for-you solutions, whether it s meal plans or even just the simple act of writing out or choosing the recipe you re going to have for dinner the morning of or the day before, it just alleviates all that thinking. You know exactly what you re going to have, there s no thinking about it. It s like going to the gym without a plan. It s like, I m going to do a little of this, little of that. It s not a very effective workout versus just even writing a couple exercises down at the very minimum can give you that much more structure. Eric: Absolutely. I think one of the key things another thing, if I can just branch off from that another exercise we do with most of our clients who are in this fat-loss or weight-loss mode is, we actually do an exercise called a skill scan with them. Most of us who are in this industry recognize that constantly eating out at a restaurant is probably not going to serve your weight-loss goals. Yuri: Yeah, unless you re eating at a five-star restaurant, but most people aren t. 10
Eric: It s just not going to happen. One of the questions, then, becomes for a lot of our clients is: Do you know how to cook? Again, back to these basics of decision fatigue, availability, and hunger, if you re really hungry, you want food that tastes good. What we run into a lot are people who go, No, I don t know how to cook. I can t cook. I never learned how to cook. Anything I make doesn t taste as good as stuff I eat at a restaurant. Now you re faced with a totally different paradigm or problem because I can take that person and go, Here are the recipes, here s the food plan. This is what I need you to do, and they re looking at it and going, Dude, I have no idea what you re talking about. I had a conversation with a chef recently, and he was asking me about cooking meat and using these different words. I m like, Yeah, I have no idea what you re talking about. A lot of us, we have all this background knowledge, and yet, for a lot of our clients who are struggling, they re severely lacking in basic skills that they probably need, or they need to be able to hire someone to do that for them, but in a way that s beneficial. This whole idea of environmental design and really thinking through how to handle all these problems before you re tired and before hunger really kicks in. I think that right now, from my perspective, that s the best stuff we have to offer. Yuri: Yeah, totally. I think really empowering people with either learning how to cook or finding out some other healthy option is very important. I posted something a while ago on Facebook; I said maybe you know this more than I do, working with a lot of special task forces and stuff I believe more Americans know how to fire a handgun than they do to cook their own food. I don t know if that s true or not. Eric: Statistically, I don t know, but it wouldn t surprise me. Yuri: Yeah. Sure, we have to be able to fend for ourselves if we have to, but if you think about nourishing ourselves as the basic primitive skill that, if we don t have, we essentially perish, I guess probably with the advent of all the canned foods after the World Wars, that kind of just took women out of the kitchen and stuff. And there are generations that don t even know how to prepare food anymore. Hopefully, we can get people back into the kitchen and really encourage that type of behavior. It has to be I think there has to be a bigger shift, with governmentally or with the food companies or something, but I don t know if that s ever going to happen. Eric: There are profits involved, so Yuri: Exactly. 11
Eric: A little challenging. I completely agree with you. You see it, as you said, generation by generation and, obviously, family unit by family unit. I would say the vast majority of people I work with either do not know how to prepare food well to the point that they re like, I love what I cook. I love the flavors I m able to create. If you ask most people to compare it to what they would purchase at a restaurant, they go, Well, the restaurant food tastes better. A lot of it comes down to skill and then time. The other constant complaint I hear about food preparation is time. One of those skill scan ideas is: Do you know how to prepare something that tastes amazing in 20 minutes? Or prep it ahead of time so it s waiting for you when you come home? I think there are some really basic questions around that that are so much more important than what your macronutrient ratio is for the meal. Yuri: Absolutely. We ve talked a lot about intuitive training, which I find is a very fascinating concept because so many people are unique, as you mentioned, and they re following the same cookie-cutter program, whether it be one of mine or P90X or anything else, and not everyone responds the same. Can you talk about what intuitive training is in your mind? How does somebody follow a proven plan if they don t know what they re doing but still train intuitively, if that makes any sense? Eric: This is something I spend a tremendous amount of time on. If people want to go read about it, you can Google something called auto-regulation or auto-regulatory training. It is a very interesting phenomenon, and we re still trying to figure out in the literature how well it works against standard programs and, more importantly, who it applies to. Is it better for the novices? Is it better for the expert? I have seen this approach work really well across the whole spectrum. Generally, what we try to encourage people to understand is that if you re new to exercise and you don t really have any idea how to build a basic exercise protocol, then you need to get some help. You need a plan to follow to start. The second thing I always try to get people to understand is that exercise is supposed to make you feel good, not bad. Yuri: Oh, I crushed myself in the gym today. It feels so good! Eric: It seems simple, but if you start an exercise program and, four weeks in, you feel like you re working but your body feels worse than when you started, you re probably doing the wrong thing. We spend a lot of time in our courses teaching people what we call self-assessments. There are a lot of basics around that, but the end goal I tell people is that you should always be moving better when you leave the gym than when you walked in. Yuri: I want to just jump in there quickly. How do you advise that individual when, maybe a couple days later, they might be getting the DOMS delayed onset muscle soreness or the general muscle soreness if they re not used to that? Is that a normal thing for them to experience? How do you let them know this is okay or this is too much? How do you draw the line for them? 12
Eric: Super important: you have to set expectations for people. If they re new to exercise, there s going to be soreness. That s the basics. It s called delayed onset muscle soreness; it usually peaks about 48 hours after that hard workout or new workout. I just set expectations and tell them to anticipate it, but I am always also trying to help them differentiate between discomfort and pain. Discomfort is stuff that you can move through, and it s like, Eh, I feel like I used that calf. Pain means you want to actually stop moving. If people are very clear on that distinction, it usually helps them understand if this was a beneficial stressor or if they pushed it too far; just to differentiate between discomfort and pain very, very clearly. To go back to this whole idea of self-assessment, my goal, I tell everyone that you want to feel like you re moving better when you leave than when you walked in, which means that your workout programs should actually improve your ranges of motion, they should improve your strength, and they should improve your balance. We often will teach people, when they first get into the gym, spend two or three minutes warming up, getting your heart rate up, and then test some shoulder ranges of motion, test some forward bend, backward bend, some rotations. And in between each exercise set, retest those same things. What most people will figure out very quickly is that if they have a baseline set of movements or other skills that they re assessing, some exercises will make them better at those things, and some exercises will make them worse at those things. Particularly for the first 6 to 12 months of training, I get people to avoid exercises that make them worse at things. If I do an exercise and, all of a sudden, my shoulders are not moving well, we might want to modify that one. The other thing that we talk a lot about with all athletes we work with, we are very big because of how neurology works, on actually assessing how you respond to exercising the right side of your body and your left side of your body. This one s really weird for people. It seems very intuitive that we should always be doing everything symmetrically I need to work my right side as much as I work my left side. What people don t realize is they re coming in to training highly asymmetric. Yuri: Especially if they re a tennis player. Eric: Exactly. We spend a lot of time when we first start working with people helping them identify if they maybe need to spend one or two months just primarily doing 80 percent of the work on one side of the body. We see some really phenomenal results when we bring things down to that level. That s a little bit outside this idea of intuitive training, but it really does attach back to the idea that I believe there s intuitive training that can be guided by physical-performance measure. As I said, you re testing your movement, you re testing your strength and balance. You may find that I worked the left side of my body, I feel awesome, and I move better. I would tell you to do more of that or do that for a while, and then when your tests are showing your body s responding equally, then you start going back to more bilateral work. 13
Our goal in our business, and I think what we re trying to push in the industry, are these kinds of intro workout evaluations to figure out what you most need. A lot of times, it does pull you away from a standard written program. As I said, if you have no idea where to start, then obviously you need a path and you need someone to teach you how to do the basics for sure. Yuri: It s an interesting thought because a lot of times, you re following a program, and you re like, I really don t feel like doing this workout today. Maybe that s your body saying you shouldn t do that workout today. But you re like, I have to follow the program, and you just keep pushing through it. That s why I love the whole discussion of intuitive training. Well, maybe I should do some yoga today or something else that s more in line with how I feel. It s very interesting. Eric: I always encourage people when they re first broaching this idea, avoid the low feeling and avoid the high feeling. Here s why: Let s say you re doing P90X and it s Cardio Kenpo day or whatever it is they re doing that day. You wake up and you re like, I don t feel like I have the energy for that. That s a problem. You also have people who wake up super, super like, Ahhh! actually over-energized. In both cases, bad things can happen. A lot of people, whenever they re going through a high stress response, their body s producing more adrenaline, so they walk into an exercise setting thinking they feel awesome physically, but, really, what s happened is they re over-adrenalized. That s when they feel awesome. We see a lot injuries occur. When people are training at that level, because they re already super stressed, and that s when the adrenaline is pumping. I always tell people, You ve got to know yourself a little bit and recognize when you re super-low energy and when you re super-high energy compared to normal. And, in both cases, be a little cautious going into your workouts. Yuri: Awesome, great advice. I ve got one more question for you; it s actually more of a request. I got an e-mail this morning from the United Nations. Yeah, it was pretty amazing. They re like, Hey, Yuri, we re facing this problem where the human species is about to become extinct because of this obesity crisis. They re like, Well, I understand you re talking to Dr. Eric Cobb later today, so can you ask him what the number one thing that we can do today to start to reverse the problem would be? What would you tell them? By the way, I didn t actually get that e-mail. I m just kind of making up the scenario. Eric: This is a hard question for me to answer because as much as I would like to point to physiology, at the end of the day, I believe most of the research and most of our experience is pointing at reshaping in the environment and reshaping behavior. 14
If I take one big step out of the health-and-fitness world and I look at the general education environment that all of our kids particularly are coming up in now, one of the biggest lacking pieces is teaching self-regulation, helping people understand how they build their lives, how they build their habits in an intelligent, conscious way. I believe that one of the big answers to the obesity epidemic is actually a reeducation of people about how to effectively create behavior change that does not depend on being stronger mentally on having greater willpower, but, instead, says, Hey, here are a lot of other sources of influence that we can use to really create the results that we re looking for. As I said, I d love to come up with some cool exercise or whatever. I think a lot of it comes down more to helping people understand how they function and equipping them with tools to make better decisions. Yuri: That s great. I love putting people on the spot with this question because it really brings out the best. That was a great answer. Thank you for that. It s been a pleasure connecting with you, as always. For everyone watching and listening, be sure to check out Dr. Eric Cobb s stuff at the link below this video. We ll have some links for Z-Health and all the awesome stuff you re up to. I want to thank you once again, buddy, for taking the time to join us in the Fat-Loss Summit. Eric: Thanks very much. I really enjoyed it. Yuri: Awesome. 15