Episode Highlights

• What is Condition 4 Life and how it helps to create balance throughout the whole body to improve mobility & performance
• Michael’s path to becoming a performance coach
• How to condition all parts of the human being, i.e. the “Movement Triangle” of Body, Mind, and Spirit
• How the movement chain works to fix mobility issues
• Integrating “Movement, Nourishment, Rest, and Relationships”
• How a movement therapy session can work remotely via Skype
• How to apply the movement chain to other portions of your life (i.e. mind and spirit)
• How making a change in your life can affects personal relationships and how to deal with that
• How to embrace a mindset and lifestyle around being healthier, and how to do it via online coaching

Useful Links

• Condition 4 Life homepage
• Gray Institute
• FiP hiking group
• Happy documentary 

Transcript

Zack Arnold: So I am joined today by Michael Rizk, a lifestyle and performance catalyst, and the owner of Conditioning for Life. So, Michael, it is a pleasure to have you on the show today.

Michael Rizk: Thanks, Zack.

Zack Arnold: So, just to give a little bit of background, the way that I found Michael is actually the other way around. Michael found me. I got an email from him several months ago. He had found the Fitness of Post program through a person in the post production industry that had worked with him, and we just had a conversation, and he kind of walked me through some of the things that he did. And I had a very specific need at the time, and that was that through all of the training that I do for Spartan races and just the high intensity interval training that I do several times a week, I was having issues with my hip area and just tightness, and he’s like, “Oh yeah, that’s something that I can do is walk you through a protocol to kind of help you work through that. And I thought that you were just kind of a mobility specialist slash personal trainer, but since we started working together in a capacity where you’re kind of coaching me, I realized that you have just a much more all-encompassing approach to improving your life and bettering yourself, and it’s not just about here’s where to put a lacrosse ball to loosen your IT band. There’s way more to it. So, can you just kind of give me the elevator pitch for what condition for life is and what service you provide to people?

Michael Rizk: Yeah, for sure. So, basically, you know, seeing people vying for extreme approaches to getting what they’re looking for in life, kind of reaching their preferred status, like as we like to call it. We try and help people to create lifestyles where the byproduct of that lifestyle is actually the goals that they want to reach. So, for instance, if somebody wants to lose weight in my studio, we don’t own a scale, nor do we allow people to set goals such as weight loss. Weight loss is the byproduct of a certain lifestyle, and so what I try and do is redirect their focus from the scale to the lifestyle measurements that we can actually improve upon. And it’s kind of neat because it really energizes the experience. It doesn’t make it about you know did I lose a couple pounds this week or did I not lose a couple pounds? Because that for a lot of people is a defining moment. They really judge themselves by the weight that they can lose and the effectiveness of you know their their program and their efforts. So we try and create the lifestyle and look at the bigger picture to satisfy the person’s fundamental needs. And as a byproduct, they end up reaching their goals. But we take a little bit of a different viewpoint. As far as myself personally, that’s probably the primary thing that I do, and along with a service that I have created called corrective movement therapy, and it’s a similar approach. You know, so I have a question that I usually lead with, and I’ll say, you know, if you’re considering buying a house and you walk in and you see the ceiling has cracks in it. What’s the first thing that comes to mind? And people say, “Well, I would think maybe the foundation has an issue. And I would agree. If you want to buy a used car and you’re in the lot and you see one set of the tires actually is wearing unevenly, what are you thinking? Well, the alignment’s off. Well, if you go in for traditional therapy with knee pain, what do you think it is that they’re looking for and treating? Well, they’re treating the knee. So I find it interesting how when we’re looking for a house or for a car, we automatically think about the big picture and the foundation of those structures. But when it comes to the human body, the way it’s been taught throughout the industry is that it’s very segmented. So in essence, we end up treating parts and not the whole body. So what I do is I help people focus on how to create balance within their entire body, which creates an environment for the body to heal itself. So it’s a little bit of a backdoor approach, but it’s proven to be very effective.

Zack Arnold: I love all of that, and that’s one of the things that really drew me to you. And it almost it seemed almost like it was too easy because I was kind of in the market for a lifestyle and performance coach, just because I’m always looking to improve myself, and the best way to do that is through accountability. And you happen to find me at the same time, and I’m like, well, there’s no way it can just make sense that it’s the right person the first time and it’s some random email. But we really have really aligned strategies and ways that we do things, and like when you say that your clients aren’t even allowed to put a number on the scale and say they want to lose weight, that’s really my approach as well. Where yes, I do weigh myself and have that metric, but I don’t set specific goals that are just centered around that. The byproduct of my goals is losing weight. But before we kind of move forward into some of the nitty gritty specifics of what you do and your philosophies and how you can help people, I actually want to move backwards a little bit. So, can you kind of talk about your journey to how you got to running this lifestyle and performance company and what you did in the past and just your your education and what what brought you to the point where you are now

Michael Rizk: Absolutely, yeah. So in 1999 is when I got started in the fitness industry as a personal trainer, and you know I think at that time I was in my early 20s. My objectives were a lot different than they are now. At that point, it was a lot more superficial. It was a lot more about vanity and looking good and feeling. Good just wasn’t as much of a concern because honestly, in your early 20s, your body’s really taking care of mostly everything for you. And I’d be working out with clients, and you know they would be in discomfort, or they just had limitations in their physical capacity, and that that was stumbling to me. I couldn’t really comprehend that, and you know I recall you know just working with a client, and they’re like, “Oh yeah, I’m doing this curl, and it feels like my biceps tearing in half. I’m like, “Well, yeah, that sounds good. That’s like what it should feel like. She’s like, “No, no, this is something that’s you know above and beyond. Like I know the feeling that we’re after, and that this isn’t it. And so I didn’t get it. And you know, sure enough, you have other clients. Well, we do this lunge, and my knee hurts. I’m like, “What do you mean? Your knee hurts. Keep going. You know your goal is more important, isn’t it? And it was kind of that that brute approach. There was actually one defining day that I can recall, like it was yesterday. I had a slew of clients that I was working with, and every client I had that day, I think I had about eight or 10 appointments. Everyone had a massive limitation in their ability to move or exercise, and as a new trainer, I didn’t really have a lot of skill sets at the time. So when you tell me that I can’t squat or lunge or we can’t do some form of a press, that really kind of took away a lot from my arsenal. I felt limited by that, and then therefore inferior. And so what I decided to do was I really started looking into the whole flexibility side of things because I was like, you know, I see some other trainers doing this stretching stuff, and I think there’s probably something to that. So sure enough, I start going down the flexibility trail, long and short. Flexibility led to me actually going for my massage therapy certification. I was now a qualified practitioner to put my hands on people as well as do the personal training side of things, and it was difficult though because I was still trying to figure out how do I blend those two services. So I really became attracted to the flexibility, mobility, soft tissue health side of things. So I continued to push my education in that that direction. I had went through active release techniques, total body certification course. ART is the only medically patented soft tissue therapy technique. Basically, they teach you how to treat just about every soft tissue limitation there could be within the body. But at this point now, I still had two very good skill sets, but I didn’t really know how to put them together. Lo and behold, I came across Gary Gray, the Dr. Gary Gray, the founder of the Gray Institute, and he had this whole program called Applied Functional Science, and it was all driven by empowering practitioners with a thought process or a way of thinking about working with people. So I had watched four years worth of his videos, four or five years worth of videos, probably all within a year. I was completely hooked. The messaging that he was delivering about how the body optimally functioned was much different than what I was hearing mainstream. And while there was a disconnect, it intuitively made sense to me. So I ended up going to a chain reaction seminar where I got to meet Gary, and Gary had at some point over that weekend. He said, “Hey, I’d like everyone to meet these gift fellows. And gift fellows are people who have went through this 40-week mentorship program that I’ve created called Gift, and I just like to have them share their experience with you.

Michael Rizk: There was probably about a dozen people who got up and shared their experience, and I have to tell you, it was kind of one of those things. It’s like, all right, is he paying them to say this? I mean, because it just sounds a little too good to be true. Or did he kind of slip everybody the happy pill because everyone seems to be way too happy? So basically, what I was hearing was that this course had changed their life in more ways than one. Not only did it help them as a human being, as an individual, it also helped them change the way they think about working with their clients on a daily basis, and that was what really attracted me at the time. So I end up signing up for the gift program. About two weeks later, I told my wife that I signed up for it. It was a very big investment, and probably the biggest investment I’ve ever made in myself. It was a 40-week mentorship, and the gift is that they really teach you how to think for yourself. So one of the one of the concepts was, you know, we can’t tell you how to enhance someone’s performance or how to get them out of pain because listen, we’re not going to be there with you. But what we’d like to do is teach you how to think about working with this person to help them reach their goals, and so they really give you a bucket. It’s called principle, strategy, and technique thought process. So they teach us about these fundamental principles of human movement that are undeniable and always hold true, such as three dimensionality. So if I train and condition a client, I want to work them with them with them in three planes of motion, or three dimensionally, because that’s how our bodies move on a day-to-day basis. So I’m trying to train and condition people more applicable to how they live their life each and every day, even though they may not be aware of it. Things like you know, how does gravity play into your training conditioning programs? How is flexibility and stiffness and the. Concept of someone’s body following the path of least resistance. How does this play out in your training and conditioning sessions? So they teach you these principles, and then they empower you to come up with a strategy for your client. So you know, okay, you’re having low back pain, and through this comprehensive assessment, this analysis, what I realize you don’t have is you don’t have hip extension with internal rotation, so the strategy is to improve hip extension with internal rotation. But the technique that I use is based on my particular skill sets. So for me, I can apply soft tissue techniques, I can apply foam rolling techniques, I can apply stretching techniques to accomplish the strategy. But it’s all tied back to principle, so I don’t know if this is making sense, but the principles, the fundamental truth of how we move, is used to develop strategies to enhance someone’s performance or get them out of pain. And then the technique that I implement is based upon the personal skill set that I have. The nice thing about this model is that any practitioner can bring their own skill sets and their own thought process to the table. They may go about it a completely different way, but it’s unique to their skill sets and what you know what their knowledge is. So this PST thought process has really actually changed the way that I live my life, how I think about people, how I treat people personally, how I treat my wife and my son has changed in the last six years. One of the other key things that they taught through the gift program is that we’re an interconnected body, mind, and spirit. What I’ve come to term the movement triangle. You know, people often come to me for the body. It’s the mind that holds them back and the spirit that suffers. And just appreciating that we’re a 3d being body, mind, and spirit. We’ve also been taught how to train and condition all parts of a human being. You know, to have somebody come in who’s having a tough day at work and just to kind of go and hit the weights.

Michael Rizk: You’re kind of taking that body strategy, but maybe what do they really need is a little bit of mental and emotional encouragement, and maybe some you know some kind of spiritual connection to say, “Hey, how’s everything going today? So it’s been an evolution over the last 15 years, and I went through I think from a very superficial standpoint of hey, what’s the body that you’re looking for, and how can we create that? To hey, how can I help you today, and what are all the things that we have to consider about your lifestyle that may actually impact your ability or inability to reach this goal, and let’s come up with a realistic strategy and empower you with the knowledge that you need, so that you can create success sustainably, you know, for the rest of your life and ultimately on your own.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, I think that that’s a really fantastic, well-rounded approach, and I want to hit all three sides of those triangle, but I want to start from the the physical side and just kind of break down a specific example so people can kind of apply what you’re talking about to their own lives or their own situation. And I’m just going to use myself as an example. When I had first come to you, like I’d mentioned briefly earlier, it was because I’ve chronically had really, really tight hips for most of my life. I was kind of one of those stupid teenage kids that, while I was in the process of learning martial arts, I would watch Jean Claude Van Damme movies and say, “Well, I want to put my feet on chairs and I want to do the splits too. So I would do all these stupid, ridiculous stretches without any training whatsoever. And I don’t know this for a fact, but I’m fairly convinced that that destroyed the proper development of all the connective tissue in my hips. Because even by the time I was 18 years old, I was going to orthopedists, and they would do the basic movements and rotations and stretches for the hips. And they, I literally had one orthopedist look at me and say, “You have the hip mobility of an 80-year-old woman. And I was 18 years old, and I was in really good shape. Like I was trim, probably less than 10% body fat, but I couldn’t move my hips, and that has caused a chain reaction throughout you know the next 15 years of my life. And I’m just now deciding it’s time to correct that. And that’s something that I’ve been working on with you, where you were saying, well, when you go to the doctor and you say my knee hurts, they look at your knee, and my big problem is that it causes knee pain, but you don’t say. Let’s look at your knee. You say let’s look at the whole chain. So just kind of walk me through your thought process when I first came to you and said every time I run more than four or five miles, I get this really sharp pain on the outside of my knee and my IT band. And what your approach was in your mind to say let’s fix that, but it’s not the need,

Michael Rizk: Right? So obviously, we had went through you know pretty extensive conversation where I had learned a lot about your individuality, your previous experiences such as setbacks and injuries, medical history. All those things are very important as they’re drivers of where you are and who you are today. Once I have a pretty good understanding of your history, then we can start to look kind of more to the body. The first thing that I try and get people to think about is the site of pain versus the source of pain, and you know where you’re feeling it is not necessarily where it’s coming from. And I use I like to use analogies because we need to be able to relate it to everyday things. If you think about you know a woman who had her purse snatched, she’s the victim. She’s going to be screaming, and so you obviously want to go and you want to console her and you make sure that everything’s okay. But let’s say she’s the screaming knee. But now really, what she’s saying, hey, I want you to go find out who actually took the purse from me. Who is actually the culprit here? And that’s what I’m interested in finding in the body is who’s the culprit creating the symptom, and that’s really where I want to focus because by addressing the fundamental cause of the issue, the symptoms essentially fall by the wayside. So the first thing is trying to get the mindset shifted around and giving me the permission to take a different approach to actually restoring them because even though we may have been through 10 different therapy experiences, and none of them have had long-term success. It’s a process that we’ve become used to, and we have an expectation formed around that. So the first thing I try and do is redirect the mindset to make sure that we’re kind of on the same page, so to speak. Then what I do is I start to tell them a little bit about some of the body’s fundamental needs in order to enhance our performance, to prevent injury, to optimize our ability to recover from stressful situations, including you know physical races like a Spartan race. We talk about some of the things fundamentally that the body needs in order to do that. And as you know, I’m just going to mention briefly here, but our environment is where we get resources to accommodate life’s demand, so we want to have a high quality of life when it comes to movement, nourishment, rest, and relationships. One of the needs from the body standpoint is the body actually optimally performs when it has balance within the system. By balance, what I mean is balance within the joints. Now we talk often about the importance of core training, and core strength is actually the number one fitness goal. But there’s a big disconnect for me because how is core strength the number one fitness goal? We definitely have some of the coolest technology around to train the core than ever before. Yet lower back pain is still the number one disability in the world, so clearly there’s a fundamental understanding of how our core actually works, and I think there’s a lot of hype around the core for very good reasons. Listen, it’s part of every single movement that we do. So what I try and do is I help people see that their core is made up of a variety of bones. Basically, everything but your arms and your legs is your core, and what we want to do is we want to measure the position of the core. And the two bones that I focus on are the pelvis and the rib cage. So I just see in three-dimensional space what’s your pelvis position, what’s your rib cage position, and let’s try and understand the relationship between these two and see if we couldn’t create an environment where we can get them to kind of move from a symmetrical standpoint to get them to function along better with one another. So we start with the core position, and everything kind of unfolds from there.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and that’s something that I remember that we did the first time that we worked together. Is and I and I knew that we were doing this was, but I wasn’t surprised because I had done some of my own basic research about mobility. But coming to you with knee pain, you said, “All right, and we did this via a video chat on Skype. So this is something that anybody in the world can do that has an internet connection. It’s not like they have to be in Los Angeles and go to your office, which is another cool thing about this. But we were on a video chat on Skype. You looked at me standing, and you’re like, “Okay, well, turn your hips this way, turn your hips that way. You know, like bend side to side, and you had me draw this beautiful stick figure man that had this, you know, this nice little set of hips on it. And you were, you know, telling me where to draw arrows as far as the way that my hips were rotated in the correct, the incorrect direction, and tilted in the incorrect direction. And just by doing that simple exercise for maybe 10 minutes, you were really able to pinpoint exactly where to stick a lacrosse ball or where to use a foam roller to kind of you know have things help and improve down the chain. So, kind of walk me through the specifics of how that chain works exactly.

Michael Rizk: Absolutely, great question. So the you know the majority of therapy, the way that we determine when an event is, you know, in an encounter is successful, is really are we are we less symptomatic than when we got there, or is the pain gone? And the problem is that pain is a very poor indicator of movement health and overall function. We can actually have poor movement for a long time before we ever become symptomatic. In fact, we can have very poor function and never become painful or manifest in a physical way. So what I try and do because we can’t measure pain. Pain is a subjective experience. You might say, Mike, I’m in excruciating pain, and you can say on a one to 10 scale it feels like an eight. But realistically, I can’t truly measure your pain. It’s not like we could pour something into a glass or take out a measuring stick and measure it in some way. It’s a subjective experience. So what I try and do is redefine this therapy process by helping people to measure movement and the quality of their movement. Because when movement asymmetries are noted, and then we create an opportunity to introduce balance into the system, and the body’s all of a sudden moving more symmetrically, and as a byproduct of that, the symptoms have reduced. Now we can tie an objective measure to a subjective response. Does that make sense?

Zack Arnold: Yeah, it absolutely makes sense, and that’s the process that you and I have gone through. Where, like I said, we’ve we’ve done that visual assessment, where you would kind of look at the alignment of my body and do these specific rotations. And one example that it’s going to be very hard to describe this in an audio podcast, but I’ll try because it’s kind of been one of those tiny, minute things you would never think about in a million years, but is actually revolutionary and kind of clicks in your brain, or at least it did for me. Or imagine you’re just standing, you know, straight up, and you have your feet about hip width apart. You put your hands on your hips, and without moving your feet, you just rotate as far as you can to the left and rotate as far as you can to the right. And it seems really simple, and you’re like, “Oh, this is fine. But you were pointing out these minute differences in where my weight was distributed. So I would turn and rotate as far as I could to my left without moving my feet, and I would have my weight distributed on the outside edge of my foot. But then I would turn to the right, and I would still have the weight in the middle of my foot. And my first thought was, oh, there’s obviously something wrong when I go to the left because I don’t feel balance. And you’re like, no, no, no, no, no. That’s actually the opposite. So when I turned to the right and my foot didn’t kind of roll to the outside, that meant that I didn’t have enough mobility in the right side. So we’re very targeted based on where to put the lacrosse ball and how to roll it out and create this kind of protocol that’s specific to me and what it’s done for me by focusing on something so minute and specific is it has completely alleviated the IT band pain that I get in my right knee when I run. And within I don’t know probably a week of doing this protocol, maybe a little bit more, I went out for like a five mile run where usually I would start to feel intense stiffness, and I wouldn’t be tired, I wouldn’t be winded, but I would just be like my knees had enough. I felt nothing. I felt like I was running on a cloud just by using a lacrosse ball on the outside of my right hip for 10 minutes a day.

Michael Rizk: Right, and you know what we’re really looking at the kind of the sophisticated side of all this because it can sound a little conceptual and vague, but more or less, what I was looking at was the chain reaction. So, if I ask you to do a movement, and this is kind of the premise of what I do, if I ask somebody to squat, for instance, Zack, I pretty much expect to see them drop straight down and come straight back up. But when I see as they squat and they descend and they slide off to one side or their hips twist in some way. That’s an abnormal response. It’s not what I intended to see. Now, it’d be different if I said, “Hey, as you squat, I want you to slide your hips or twist your hips. Then I’d expect to see that. But when I don’t expect to see it, I then start to think about how can I bridge the gap between what I’m seeing, this compensatory mechanism, versus ideally what I want that optimal chain reaction. So just by having you twisting your hips to the right and the left, let’s say we went to the right. Now, when you twisted your hips to the right from the standing position, we saw compensation. We saw that you really couldn’t get your weight to the outside of your right foot, even though you were trying with all your effort to push it in that direction. We know that your body is subconsciously designed to follow the path of least resistance, and by turning your hips to the right, what you showed me is that you didn’t have an ability to internally rotate your right hip at the same time and in the same zone of movement. You also showed me that you weren’t able to externally rotate your left hip. You showed me that you weren’t able to supinate your right foot, and you weren’t able to pronate your left foot. These are all movements I’m looking at, or all segments of movement that I’m looking at. So within one movement pattern, when you turned your hips to the right, all those things should be occurring at all those joints. But I didn’t see them happening. The next thing we needed to figure out was why wasn’t it happening, and that’s obviously where we started to explore. And I told you when we do a treatment, our number one objective is to improve balance in your body. You may like the way the treatment feels. You might like the way that I encouraged the way you were doing it. You might have really enjoyed that it just kind of took a little bit of you know stress out of your day. You could have liked it for a lot of reasons, but if it didn’t improve balance, it didn’t objectively do what we wanted it to do, and that doesn’t make it a bad treatment. It just means we need to do less of that and more of something else. So it’s a matter of just trying to connect the dots on global limitations, but then ultimately find out what’s limiting them. Now, for you specifically, your issue-we kind of were looking at your hips. The issue happened to actually be within your hips. So then, what I did was I said, “Well, Zack seemingly has a difficult time internally rotating his right hip. Now that I have a motion that I’m focused on.” Improving now, we can talk about muscles like the IT band, the lateral hamstrings, the hip rotators, the glute maximus-all these muscles that are designed to control internal rotation. And when are stiff, will limit internal rotation. So that’s how we-that was the strategy and the thought process that I had used to get to that exact treatment that we performed

Zack Arnold: As a you know fitness geek and nutrition geek and really cutting into all the details and the science. This to me is really really cool, and I may have lost half my listeners because they’re like, “What is supination and IT band and whatever? I don’t know any of that stuff, but the point is that that’s the stuff that you understand and you know, and the user or the the client that’s coming to you, they don’t need to know all that stuff. They just need to know where to put the lacrosse ball or where to put their foot in a certain kind of stretch. And it’s all very very easy to approach. But where it gets really cool for me is that you’re not just about the physical side. You can apply the same chain reaction philosophy to all facets of life. So can you just very quickly reiterate what the three sides of the triangle are, and then move to the next component and how you can use the same analogy of the chain to apply to other portions of your life?

Michael Rizk: Absolutely, yeah. So, and just to create some clarity, I know that the words can become intense and maybe even a little intimidating if you don’t understand them, what I was saying was when you were twisting to your right, I was trying to look at the parts of the body that weren’t participating in that twisting motion, and then it was my job to figure out what wasn’t twisting, and to then maybe stretch it out or use a foam roll to get it to twist better. When it twisted better, you felt better, and then therefore you perform better. Hopefully, that kind of makes a little more sense.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, absolutely. I think that it all made perfect sense. I just want to make sure that people don’t get overwhelmed by the details because it’s really not about the details. It’s about doing very simple, small, minute changes that can then lead to much larger results. Right. So yeah. So I’m just I’m just very excited about how this can apply to other facets of people’s life as well.

Michael Rizk: Excellent, yeah. So the the 3D part of the of the triangle is body, mind, and spirit. We obviously just talked about the body, and that’s what people usually come to me for. But what I find holds most people back, or kind of what gets in the way of them and where they want to be, is their mind, and as I mentioned earlier, it’s the spirit that suffers. How we feel, we feel down about our situation because we’re ultimately not where we want to be. But we’re really putting our best foot forward and just can’t seem to get there. The mind is a tricky one, Zack. You know, I would say there’s two patterns that I’ve observed. There are people who believe in themselves, I would say that they have their mind on their side. They’re not scared to engage a trial or a challenge. They’re willing to work through a setback. They have what I’d call a growth mindset. When somebody believes in themselves, it makes an infinite difference in their ability to actually reach their goals. And then there’s the other side, and I am simplifying this. But then there’s people who really struggle. They don’t. They don’t have the belief in themselves that they can actually get there. Maybe because they’ve tried to reach a goal 10 times before and they’ve failed every time. So then we start to question our ability to get there. And so what I try and do is I essentially try and help people get their mind on their side to empower them with the knowledge that they need, and then to really encourage their mindset and encourage them to kind of go down the path that they’re looking for. For instance, is if where we are today is not where we want to be tomorrow, and the objective is to go north, we have to expect that we’re going to go a little northeast and a little northwest. Essentially, life’s going to happen. We’re human beings. We’re going to go a little off track, but that’s normal. It’s about not going so far off track and taking it to an extreme where we completely we’re kind of off the bandwagon, and then we end up running back to our starting point. So it’s about helping people see that it’s okay to not be perfect. It’s really important that you’re patient with yourself through the process of change. It’s understanding about kind of where you are in the whole process of change. Not everybody’s ready to take action right away, but they’re very interested in hearing about a solid approach as to how to get there, so that when they’re ready to take action, they’re ready. And so, what I do is I assess the mindset, really determining their readiness to change, managing expectations, and really creating a little bit of peace with the whole process of change. Because change, in and of itself, is difficult.

Zack Arnold: So, an example of kind of what I’m talking about for this next mental component is on my previous episode that I had with Alan Bell, the editor of The Hunger Games and Amazing Spider-Man, and all that. We talked about a specific behavior that he had, where he said that he always needed to eat something very, very crunchy in front of the TV or in front of his monitor before he went to bed, and this obviously wasn’t a need. Where he was, you know, cheese it deficient. He wasn’t micronutrient deficient. It was a habit based on comfort and based on relieving stress. And this is an issue that I had for a long time as well, and still struggle with. And when you work a really high stress job, your cortisol levels are up, and the you have imbalances in ghrelin and leptin, the different hormones that regulate your appetite and your satiation, and we just talked about ways that we could kind of implement strategies to fix this. But you go much much deeper, so I’m not saying in any sense or way that you know Alan Balor or I have an emotional eating disorder, but in a way there was an emotional component to this habit that we had of needing to eat this crunchy food, or having a snack in front of the monitor. So, just talk a little bit about how you can approach somebody that has an emotional attachment to food, or just kind of take this one specific example and use the analogy of the chain.

Michael Rizk: Right. No. This and this is a very common one. We have to understand that food is used for a variety of reasons, not just fueling. Obviously, it can be used to satisfy us instantly, gratify us, if you will. You know, if somebody, let’s say, wants to lose weight, but they find that they have this emotional eating habit, that person is engaged in using a tool that they’re familiar with. It doesn’t mean it’s the best tool out there, but it’s one that they’re familiar with and they know how to use, and it creates immediate comfort for them in their situation, so it’s first understanding and appreciating that the only reason they’re using the emotional eating tool is because it’s one that they’re familiar and comfortable with. So what I make sure of is I never judge the behavior. I seek to understand the motivation behind it. So the question that we have to really ask is why are you emotionally eating, and so someone may say, for instance, Zack, that you know what I got a really high stress job. It’s just it’s really taken the life out of me. I don’t get to see my wife and kids often. You know, I feel like I’m kind of behind the eight ball. I don’t have a lot of of a buffer zone in my life. I have very little margin to really enjoy my life. Therefore, I’m stressed, and when I eat, it makes me feel better. Fine, let’s take it for what it is. But then, what we do is we start to find out what are the thought, the thought patterns that this person’s engaging in that’s leading up to the emotional eating. And once we find that thought, we then end up seeing because the overeating, the emotional eating itself, is the behavior, but all behavior is preceded by thought. So before eating, before we eat, we think about eating, right? So before someone emotionally eats, they’re seeing that as a tool and a strategy to kind of calm their nerves a little bit. So what we do is we find out what are the thoughts that are evading their mind, leading to that. There’s usually some form of limiting belief that’s present at that point. I’m not good enough. I’m never going to get there. I don’t see light at the end of the tunnel. Things like this. But when we let those thoughts spiral out of control, they’re going to perpetuate into a into a protective behavior or a sabotaging behavior, because if you’re trying to lose weight but you’re emotionally eating and that’s your tool that you use to kind of keep your balance in life, they’re kind of contradictory of one another. So what we try and help them do is number one, assess the thought, and then how to reprogram that thought with something that’s more positive and consistent with where they want to be. Once the thought is reprogrammed, if it’s I’m not good enough, then it could just be you know what I’m enough. Yeah, I’m a human being. I’m not perfect. It’s just really coming to terms with you know things about yourself and getting into a more positive state of mind. But then more importantly, once we have a positive affirmation, we want to pair that with a positive action. There’s a saying that neurons that wire together fire together. So to simply look in the mirror and say “I love myself, “I love myself” isn’t good enough. We need to actually engage in activities that show us that we love ourselves. It’s good to tell ourselves that, but if we’re acting in a way that shows us that we don’t love ourselves, our brain can’t recognize it and therefore do anything with it. So it’s really a matter of understanding their mindset, how the person thinks. It’s trying to get in on that thought level, and if we can impact the thoughts, then the thought really changes the behavior. And if we can change the behavior, the behavior changes the response. And if we change a response, we all of a sudden start getting someone closer to where they actually want to be.

Zack Arnold: So now we’ve talked a little bit about the emotional component. So let’s go to the next component. You had kind of mentioned the spirit a little bit, but I’ll use myself as an example. This was a component that we had talked about in one of our coaching sessions. Is you’d gone through and done a full assessment of how I feel on a scale of one to five about you know my nutrition needs and am I fueling my body properly and my movement and am I getting enough activity and enough exercise and I was feeling like I was having really really high scores on most of it and then you get to the relationship component and I kind of slip back a little bit because I am a self proclaimed and proclaimed by. Many others around me, workaholic. I love what I do for a living. I’m very passionate about it, and because of that, I struggle to find balance. And it’s something that I work on and focus on every single day. But one of the things I had mentioned is that, and you you immediately responded and said, “Oh yeah, I see this all the time. But I was saying that when you decide you want to make such a profound change in your life. Sometimes your significant other or your family can see that as a form of distancing yourself because you’re moving in one direction, but they are not at the point yet where they want to move in the same direction as well. So again, just kind of using this whole analogy of the chain and this larger, more well-rounded approach. How do you also help people to improve relationships, and how those relationships can improve all the other components of this triangle?

Michael Rizk: Right. Yeah. Great question. So, just for a little bit of clarity, when I talk about body, mind, and spirit, the more simple terms because they can be a little cliche, and people have different perceptions of what those things already mean. You know, our body is how we move. Our mind is how we think. Our spirit is how we feel. That’s simplistically how I think about it. When it comes to wanting to improve our situation, I’m basically trying to balance the scale here, Zack. I mean, this is really the overarching strategy. You know, in life there are demands and there are resources. When demands exceed resources, we have breakdown. Breakdown is inevitable. Essentially, the the demand for energy from our life is greater than the supply available. When that happens, we go into survival mode. That’s when we’re operating from behind the eight ball. We feel like we’re never going to get ahead. But the flip side of that is when resources are actually greater than demands, then we become more resilient to life and the setbacks. Because listen, even though we’re if we’re firing from our fully preferred status and everything’s going the way we want, it doesn’t mean life’s not going to be challenging. Just means that we have the resilience and the resourcefulness to actually deal with the demands of life. But when we’re operating in that that frame of mind, we’re in a thriving state. We’ve kind of unlocked our potential to really engage in life, and the four areas that we mentioned earlier-movement, nourishment, rest, and relationships-relationships are very rarely considered when it comes to our health and well-being, because that concept in and of itself is kind of a-it’s a selfish proposition, not meaning that it’s wrong. It’s just focused on us, but it’s so important that we selfishly take care of ourselves so that we can be of service to others. Interestingly, I set just as many challenges with my clients to repair their relationships and to enhance their personal environment with others just as much as I do having them change their workout or their their nutrition habits. You know, it’s really a matter of the spirit. So when I look at things from a relationship standpoint, there’s a few simple metrics. You know, are you being supportive of others, and are you being supported by others, and are you doing that in your home environment? Are you doing that in your work environment? You know, it can be hard. You know, listen, depending on the type of industry you might work in, it could be difficult to really kind of become vulnerable and let people know who you are and what you’re about, and to really see that you don’t have it all together. So when that’s the case, you know, you might not be, you might not allow people to support you in work because, in order for them to support you, you need to first admit that you’ve got some things that you maybe need some help with, and that can be a very difficult thing. So one of the key things we focus on here, especially as it ties to relationships, is being vulnerable with people, being transparent. That authenticity is always honored by the person you’re sharing it with, so long as it’s someone who deserves to know. You don’t just share with everybody and anything. We don’t want to overshare, but with the people who actually take a genuine interest in who we are as human beings, we should be forthright with them and let them know our situation, so they can give us constructive counsel. Because listen, we’re designed for connection. We’re designed to connect with other human beings, and when we don’t allow ourselves to become open, we actually shut off a part of our brain that’s trying to connect with others, and we actually don’t allow that to happen. And then there’s just a discomfort that comes within the human spirit. So supportive, being supportive of, and supported by others from the home and the workplace, but also having relationships of accountability. This is another one big one with relationships. Sometimes we get ourselves in an environment of people where everyone’s very agreeable to us, and you know we really can benefit from having somebody look in our life and say, “Hey, man, you know that’s not really the way that you want to be living.

Michael Rizk: You know, isn’t there a better way to do this? You know, come on! Don’t you expect more from yourself? Those are difficult relationships to maintain sometimes, but they’re the people who keep us on the straight and narrow. So I think it’s very important to have an accountability system within friends and family. Also, making time to connect with other people. I mean, like you said, I can definitely relate to the whole concept of you know the work. You know, I’m so passionate about what I do, and it’s always-I don’t know that you’re ever balanced, Zack, but I feel like you’re always trying to balance. It’s a matter of balancing. You know, how do you balance the demands of work with the resources of life, like your family and your support system? But making time to connect with other people who share like values and common interests is something that’s very underrated. So when our clients come in, one of the first things we’ll try and do is make sure that you know some of the relationships in their life are up to par and working well, and there’s a good support system there. But also engaging them in groups with other people who share, you know. So let’s say you like hiking. You know, is there a local hiking group that we can get you connected with other people. At least you share something with them, and then you can build a relationship from there. I found the single biggest way to get ahead in life is really to leverage your relationships, and I don’t mean that in a manipulative way. I mean that in a very genuine and authentic way. It’s really about encouraging and empowering the people around you and allowing them to do the same for you.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and just to go off on a tangent, a tiny bit. One thing that really struck me specifically with what you just said was talking about the interconnectedness of other people, and if that’s turned off, trying to turn that on. I recently saw a fantastic documentary that speaks exactly to this. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it. It’s called Happy. It was executive produced by Tom Shadyac, who was formerly a gigantic movie director that did Ace Ventura and Liar, Liar, and you know Bruce Almighty and Evan Almighty, and just kind of had this gigantic transformation in his life where he realized that you know life was about so much more than just accruing money and accruing success, and he has his own film about this journey and the struggle called I am, but kind of the follow-up companion piece, and he didn’t direct it, but he executive produced it. Was called Happy, and it’s all about from a spiritual and almost a just a scientific level how human beings are interconnected. And I think it’s really great that that’s something that you emphasize so much. Let’s talk a little bit about specifically what you’re doing with the concept of the revolution, which I kind of think is the reason that you and I connected in the first place, because that’s my idea as well. Is when you go right on the front page of the Fitness and Post site, it says join the revolution, because I’m trying to build this mindset around people in this industry realizing that better health and wellness can be done, and you have the same idea. So tell me about your version of the revolution.

Michael Rizk: Yeah, that certainly is one of the things that attracted me to your program. Is you know seeing that big revolution there, front and center. You know we’ve been seeing clients in the studio for probably better upwards of 12 years now, and it’s grown to such a level. And you know we’ve been getting over the past couple years. You know, geez, I wish, I wish that my my mother or my brother or my sister or my aunt or my uncle could join this program. But they live, you know, they’re they’re not in the vicinity. So we’ve been getting these requests, and it’s kind of like you know you feel a little defeated because you’re like, geez, I wish that I could help everybody, but I’ve only got so much bandwidth. But obviously, now with technology being so convenient and easy to use, we decided to create a platform that’s scalable, and we can allow other people to basically experience the condition for life experience, but just via the web. So basically, what we look to help people do is help them to embrace a mindset and create a lifestyle around their goals and their aspirations that they have for their life, so that’s a lot different than saying, “Hey, I want to come to you to lose weight, you know, and I want to diet and exercise to reach my goals. It’s more about helping them create that lifestyle, but it really ties back directly to the mindset because when people say, “Oh, yeah, I know I’ve got to, I’ve got to live this lifestyle, I just think that that’s become a little passe, and I’m not really sure people know exactly what that means. So, you know, rather than dieting and exercising as a means to an end, you know, can we make sure that you’re getting a lot of rest? Can we make sure that the food that you’re eating nourishes your body, your mind, and your spirit? Can we make sure that you’re leading a movement-based lifestyle? Can we make sure that your thought life is attuned to your goals and your aspirations. You know, can we get you thinking more about the solutions to your problems rather than the problems themselves? Can we get you to engage a growth mindset where you have affirmative thoughts and affirmative thinking, and pair those with constructive actions, helping people to see kind of where they are, where they want to be, and kind of what keeps them from getting to reach their full potential. That’s really kind of the heart of the revolution is helping them to create a engage a mindset consistent with where they want to be. Because as we know, change happens in the mind first, and if we can’t get things nailed down between our two years, we’ll never see it manifest in our body. And I know that can be a very frustrating process when that’s kind of the you know the hamster wheel that you’re running in,

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and I think that that’s that’s such an important thing to to emphasize. And I actually had an extensive conversation about this in my previous episode with a fellow film editor that went through this journey where she was like 90 pounds overweight, and she’s only 25 or 26 years old. She’s still very young, but. She realized that she couldn’t just do diet and exercise. It had to be about changing mindset, changing overall lifestyle choices, and realizing that it’s all about the long game and not the short game. As I’m sure you know in your business, when people say, “Well, yeah, I want to lose four inches off my waist and look good this summer when I put on my bathing suit, and you’re like, “Okay, I can do that, but that’s not really going to help you big picture, and it really sounds like you’re very much aligned with that idea.

Michael Rizk: Yeah, there’s a much it’s a much bigger commitment than just signing up for a diet and exercise program. We really help the person to look back toward themselves as their own sustainable solution, and what are all the metrics and pieces and facets of their lifestyle that they need to consider in order to really be able to reach their goals, so in many ways we’re trying to help people balance out their lifestyle, and also part of that is helping them realize that there’s no such thing as balance. I think we’re always in a state of balancing. It’s kind of this ebb and flow. We kind of move in and out of balance, and that’s just kind of part of life, and also another part of how we help people manage their mindset. So the really neat thing is by taking this approach, this big picture approach, people are reporting that you know there’s a little zest back in their marriage or their relationship with their kids have enhanced dramatically, or they’re getting compliments from people that you know they haven’t spoke to in 20 years, and the benefit or the impact of the the lifestyle change is going far beyond weight loss, not only are they losing weight, but they’re also losing their fears. They’re losing their anxieties. They’re losing their frustration, and they’re just getting that crystal clear view into you know what they really want out of life. And I think you know life has us so wrapped up, we end up losing sight of what we truly are after, and we have to remind ourselves why we’re doing what we’re doing, and to that end, we’ll help people really kind of nail down what drove them to want to lose weight. You know, it’s great that you want to lose weight, but what are the reasons? And not the superficial ones, like, oh, I want to look better on the beach. That’s great, and I’m sure you do. But at the same time, you know, maybe it’s like, hey, you know what? My parents are type two diabetics, and you know, one of them had just had a limb amputated. I mean, that’s that that pain and that fear will really motivate you. And what we need to do is be able to take those authentic drivers and spin them in a way to create some constructive activities going on in your life, consistent with where you want to be. So yeah, it largely ties back to mindset, managing expectations, and really helping people condition for their life demands.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and I think that the one of the coolest components of all this that you mentioned right at the beginning of this specific conversation is you said that it wasn’t just about people that are in your vicinity. It’s now anybody that basically has an internet connection, which is how you and I found each other because we’ve never actually met before. But the the sessions that we have done have been incredibly beneficial for me because you’re able to just use the Skype video camera and still look at my forum and direct me in ways that I need to be able to fix physical alignment or some of the the maladies that I’m dealing with that we talked about earlier in the show. And then you can do the same thing with overall lifestyle. So I think that I really, really encourage anybody that’s listening to this to you know check out your site, consider doing some type of a coaching session because I really think it makes a big difference. What I also did for you, Michael, just because I want to really encourage people in my audience to to go directly to you, I’ve set up a custom URL so they can go right through Fitness and Post and find you, so it’s super easy to remember. They can just go to fitnessandpost.com/c 4l for condition for life because I really want to kind of commit to you and I working together and me trying to use your services and bring them to my community. So it’s just c4 L, the letter C, the number four, the letter L condition for life. So I’m I’m very very excited about being able to to do that and and mesh these two worlds.

Michael Rizk: Cool, thanks, Zack. I appreciate the opportunity.

Zack Arnold: Awesome. Well, this has been just a tremendously eye opening show for me. Working with you has been a really great experience thus far, and I’m looking forward to doing a lot more and making more of these improvements. So, thank you so much for being on the show, and I really hope that you get a response from my listeners, and they reach out to you, and they can improve their lives by working with you in condition for life. Awesome! Thanks, Zack.

Episode Credits

This episode was edited by Kristin Martin, and the show was executive produced by Kanen Flowers. We are a member of the THAT STUDIO podcast network.

The music in the opening and closing of the show is courtesy of Dorian Cheah from his brilliant album ARA.