Episode Highlights

• How to settle back into a training routine after an intense event
• Natalie’s training and diet transition
• Ice Baths, Coconut water, Vital Fuel, and staying energized during extreme activity
• Dressing for activity at the office
• How to maintain an active mindset and prioritize health during your work day
• Are Vibram five fingers for you?
• What to look for while shopping for non-restrictive clothing
• Staying active and healthy while working a night shift
• The science of sunlight, sleep, and how they work together

Useful Links

• FiP Question Submission
• FiP Facebook Group
• Mark Sisson: Vibram Five Fingers
• Vibram Women’s Training Shoe
• Vibram Men’s Training Shoe
• Topo Anti-Fatigue Mat

Transcript

Zack Arnold: I am here with my fitness and post partner in crime, Natalie Boschan, and I’m very sad to say that I haven’t actually seen you in like a month, and I’ve been going through massive separation anxiety because you’re working with another editor, and I’m very, very jealous, and I don’t know how to handle that, so but I’m glad that we can be on the show again today. It’s been.. I’ve been missing our camaraderie, so

Natalie Boschan: I know. Well, now I know what it’s like to just be one of my friends. I have to schedule tie.. I’m never available now. I work in a basement, so I don’t even get cell phone calls. So now you know what it’s like to just be one of my friends,

Zack Arnold: I know it’s crazy. You work in a basement now. Does that mean you don’t get any regular sunlight?

Natalie Boschan: I do not get any regular.

Zack Arnold: Oh man, that sucks. Well, that’s maybe something we can talk about later, because I’ve been, I’ve been studying that extensively lately.

Zack Arnold: Really? Yes.

Zack Arnold: Right. No, I’ve been studying extensively the effects of sunlight and natural light based on the time of day that you get it, how it affects your circadian rhythms, and most importantly, how it affects your sleep and your creativity. So, we may or may not go into that, but it is something that I’ve been spending a good deal of time on, and I’ve actually talked to some experts about as well. So, those might be coming up in your future, right? See what happens when you give me all this free time, and I don’t have to edit stuff.

Natalie Boschan: Just go talk to experts on it.

Zack Arnold: I’m just gonna talk to people about stuff like circadian rhythm. Yay,

Zack Arnold: Photo receptors in my cells, that sounds like awesomeness. Anyway, so what we’re gonna do, like we usually do, is we’re just going to kind of riff. This is going to be like jazz. We have no plan whatsoever. This is just going to be our monthly. When she says nope, she’s like, yeah, he really doesn’t have a plan at all, because I don’t

Natalie Boschan: At the door and had myself like, gotta get on Skype, let’s do it.

Zack Arnold: That’s pretty much it. And this is actually our third try, because we tried to do this a few days ago, and you’re like, “Wait, isn’t that your birthday? And I’m like, “Ah, crap. And then we try to do it again, and you’re like, “Just wanted to let you know that it’s the bottom of the ninth in game seven of the World Series, and the Cubs are tied with the Indians, and you, of course, are from Chicago. And I’m like, “Well, I can’t record a podcast now, so we couldn’t do that, so we finally been able to make it happen. We’re on the same side of Skype, and we’re on microphones recording, so it was not easy to get here, but we’re here.

Natalie Boschan: Oh, we made it, we made it.

Zack Arnold: So, anyway, we’re gonna start jumping right into the questions, and this first question is absolutely tailor-made for you and the journey that you’ve been through the last three or four months, which I want you to talk about a little bit before answering the question, so the audience has context, but the question, which is submitted by Nick, is the days or weeks following any sort of race or marathon where you really exert yourself. What is your body immediately craving for repair and recovery? How do you slowly settle back into a training routine? And I’m totally handing this one off to you, because you just completed yet another marathon, this time the Chicago Marathon. So this one made for you.

Natalie Boschan: Yeah, I’m glad that I ran the Chicago Marathon the same year the Cubs won the World Series for the first time in 108 years.

Zack Arnold: Maybe that’s what did it. Maybe you won the Cubs the World Series,

Natalie Boschan: Me out of the other 45,000 runners that were in that race, but it was me coming home. Yeah, I mean, if you’re super, yeah, most college fans are superstitious, so we’ll say that my training regimen was basically I did four days of running, one day of cross training, one day of rest, and then one day of yoga, that was sort of the plan, it got sort of mixed up and metaled occasionally, because my office was very far from where I live, so I had a long commute, running on certain days when I had a long day, just wasn’t really feasible, and, or, you know, sometimes I would forego yoga, or something, which wasn’t good, yoga is not good to forego, because I would have a long day at work, but, but that was basically what I did, was that was what I tried to stick to, and it was tough. It was tough, because one of the runs will be somewhere between two runs during the week, or somewhere between four and six miles. One run would be anywhere between eight and 13, and then I’d have a weekend really long run, which would be anything between like 10 and 20, basically. So the day when I had to run like 13 miles and before work, that was tough. So the race happened, and what was good about the race is I did my goal. So Zack would, you would ask me, do you have a time, do you have a time in mind this time? Do you want to be your time? And I was like, no, I just want to run a better race, like I want to train better, I want to, I want to run a better race, which meant I didn’t want to over exert myself in the first half of the race, so that I couldn’t finish the second half. I didn’t want to walk, wanted to be a lot smarter about pacing myself, and I figured that would sort of put me in a position to get a better time, which it did. I got, I got a better time by two minutes. I wanted to get even better, because I felt like I had trained harder than the time that I got, like I thought it would be. I thought it would be better, but I didn’t walk, which was good. Yeah, so, and I did. I ran a better race, which was great, but afterwards I rested, you know? I slept for like two days, like I’m good sleep for about two days. Then I had to come back home to go back to work, so I only, they gave me, they gave me one day off, which was nice, but I had to come back home. The race was on Sunday, I got Monday off, and then I came back to LA on Tuesday to go back to work, but I decided I made sure to get good night’s sleep during the week, made sure to sort of stretch out as much as I could. I actually didn’t sit a ton because you don’t want your muscles to get even more sore, like the more you sit, the more like that lactic acid builds up, and that’s why when you get up, you’re all like stiff and like you can’t move, and that’s actually more of a problem is sitting for long periods of time because you’re tired, like you want to sit, your legs are tired, but it’s best to try and move around as much as possible, so you get rid of some of that acid that’s been built up in your legs, so there’s that, and then I also just like protein, protein, protein, like just lots of protein, lots of vegetables, that shake allergy, coconut water, the cafeteria, the commissary that I work at, they have sushi bowl Wednesday. I eat that like anything that can just sort of give you muscle repair, and the rule of thumb is you wait about, you can, you can go about three weeks without losing the fitness that you built up from your marathon training. So my goal was to do three weeks off, and this is my first week back, so I started running again. Well, I did yoga on Saturday. You should probably, you could do yoga in between two, like stretchy yoga, like recovery yoga. Go to yogi.com’s find some recovery yoga, just like the really nice easy stuff for the first week, or maybe even want to just rest completely the first week, and then maybe the second we start getting into like more sort of like recovery stretches, nothing like too hard on your muscles, nothing that’s going to like strain you too much. Just give yourself a break and get good sleep, and you know, just just be nice to your body for three weeks, is basically what you do when you’re recovering, is all those things that you know you should be doing all the time, like just do them, you know, tenfold when you’re recovering. And then, yeah, now I’m getting back into training. I actually have, like, this week is going to be a short week of training, so I did yoga on Saturday, like harder yoga, like more rigorous like yoga, and then I did like three miles yesterday, four miles today, and then I’ll do another four miles tomorrow, maybe some yoga Saturday, and then Sunday I get right back into it with an eight mile run, which is fine, like eight miles at, you know, a pace that’s very manageable for me, so that’s totally doable for me, but yeah, so that’s how I would say that’s a good way to sort of ease back into it, break, you know, week of like not so much for your fourth week, and then your fourth week off, and then maybe try to get back into it, depending on what’s good for you and your body, if you’re injured, though, it’s a completely other thing, like don’t don’t rush yourself when you’re injured, that’s even worse. So, don’t do that, but that’s just this is all just sort of assuming that you’re still healthy and just sort of trying to do a general recovery. If you’re in, like I said, if you’re injured, it’s totally different.

Zack Arnold: I mean, you pretty much covered everything that I would have said, and you have more experience when it comes to races and marathons, and you’re more diligent about it, like when I’ve done Spartan races, I just kind of like go balls to the wall, do px, do high intensity training, I’ll go hiking with, you know, 50 pound packs, and you know, weighted vests, and there’s kind of like no real scientific rhyme or reason to the way I do it, I just kind of push as hard as I can, and then I do a really hard race, and then I just kind of collapse, and then I give myself a week or two, and then I slowly ease back into it. So, you’re definitely more systematic about it than I am, but the one that I would reiterate more than anything else, sleep. You have to focus on letting your body recover, because every time you go to the gym, every time you run, every time you train, you’re actually breaking down your body, you’re breaking down muscle tissues, you’re making 1000s and pound 1000s of micro tears in your muscles, so you’re not actually getting in shape or getting fit when you’re exercising or going to the gym. So, if you just go to the gym for an hour and go balls to the wall and you’re lying on the ground at a pool of sweat, you haven’t done anything good for yourself yet. What you’ve done is you’ve set yourself up for recovery, which is where you get healthy, and the recovery happens during sleep. So, if you really push yourself hard, sleep is the place to do it. So, just sleep as much as possible, but then the other thing you need to couple with that is movement. Everybody knows how I feel about movement and staying active throughout the day, not even exercising, just making sure that you’re moving, and you hit the nail on the head that if you’re going to run a marathon and your legs feel like concrete weights, the last thing you want to do is sit, because your legs just get heavier and heavier and heavier, and it doesn’t mean you should continue running, it just means. Get up and walk around, and don’t be sedentary for more than 30 to 45 minutes at a time, because you feel it really fast after you’ve done something intense,

Natalie Boschan: Right after the race. Ice bath, ice,

Zack Arnold: Oh yeah, that’s a great point, because your body is so inflamed that the fastest and quickest way to reduce the inflammation throughout your body is cold, and taking an ice bath is an amazing way to do it. One of the nice things about obstacle course races is they come with ice baths built in, so you jump in the ice and you have to go underwater, and they’re like, oh, go under the barbed wire, and it’s like freezing cold, and your brain freezes. But what’s amazing is that you feel much better afterwards, and you feel the sense of rejuvenation, you know, after you know your nether regions have thought out a little bit, maybe you don’t experience that, but when a guy does the ice bath, like you know, there’s stuff that you know needs to thaw out before you can start running again. I’m just saying,

Natalie Boschan: That’s why I love the stand. Well, when I was in high school, we had these great, we had this great training room, and I had no idea, like, you don’t know what you have when you’re that age, but like we had these stand-up ice, these ice beds, so you can just stand up in, so you didn’t actually have to like sit and like get those regions in in the ice, and so it’s like way more comfortable to just stand in ice up to your, you know, up to your thigh, like up to your high thigh, and do that, but I have yet to find that somewhere else, and they actually, I mean, my plan was to go run into Lake Michigan afterwards, but it’s not really accessible from where the finish line was. I mean, not easily, so I had, so I just grabbed like five or six bags of ice, and I was just literally icing for like 40 minutes, moving them around, and I felt bad. My poor family’s waiting for me at the, like, meet your family with the other million people that are there. So, yeah, I just like grabbed all the ice, and I like put it on my legs, and I felt so much better, like, like, immensely better. I was, I felt terrible for a little while. And then the other thing is, too, is you get pet, you get, you know, you get to the finish line, and you’re like,

Natalie Boschan: “Oh, God, I finished, I can’t believe I finished.

Natalie Boschan: And there’s people walking around like, “Oh, ha ha ha, I got like three hours, it was great. And you’re like, “How do you do that? How do you not feel terrible. I hate you.

Natalie Boschan: Like, I just wonder, like, how are you just fine right now? I feel terrible. Yeah, so you know it’s good. It’s fine, but yeah. And coconut water, coconut water is also my favorite.

Zack Arnold: Yep, that’s one of the best recovery elixirs on the planet. It’s just pure coconut water, not the stuff that’s flavored, not that is added sugar, but coconut water is really the best recovery drink on the planet that I have found, and I’ve done pretty extensive research in the past when I was doing all of my training, and you can get all these powders and supplements, there’s so much stuff, the vast majority of which is just junk, but pure coconut water is amazing, and frankly, what I will use when I go on these races, and you have to have something with you, because every hour or hour and a half, you’re going to start the bonk if you don’t start to replenish the glycogen in your system, and you don’t have more energy. So I just have these packets of coconut water, chia seeds with a little bit of honey, and then there’s a powder that’s called Vital Fuel, and this is something that I used to talk about a lot on very old podcasts when I was doing more active training, and because I’ve been so focused on just trying to move more and teach people how to move more, I haven’t been training as much, and this is something I’m now starting to get back into again, but I can put a link to Vital Fuel, but really, coconut water is your best friend when you’re doing intense exercise and activity, especially afterwards.

Natalie Boschan: Yeah, no, I agree. I love it, and also good for possibly post-Halloween hangover.

Zack Arnold: Yes, I was gonna say the one thing that, given that you finished right before Halloween, I would say that loading yourself with Twix bars and Snickers, not the best method of recovery, but I will be totally honest, that I set my reward for finishing. I think it was my half marathon Spartan, I think it was the 13 mile one in the mountains. I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure that was one where I said, if I finish when I get home, if I’m still alive, I’m going to eat an entire box of Fruity Pebbles, and I do, that’s an example of how not to properly recover from a

Natalie Boschan: Risk,

Zack Arnold: But you are so ravenously hungry at the end of something like that, it doesn’t matter what you eat, you’re gonna burn it so stinking fast.

Natalie Boschan: Yeah, that happened to me for four days, like four days, I literally could eat like one pound burger and then be like, oh, full, and like 20 minutes later, yeah, I could eat again, yeah. What else do we get? Like four freaking.. that’s why protein is so important. Like, four days, I was literally like, my metabolism was just super drive.

Zack Arnold: So, since we’re talking about motion activity recovery things that are kind of, you know, physical related, I want to kind of go on to the next question, which is actually, I’m going to be combining two questions. These are going to be from Paul and from Andrew, and this is something that I think you can answer well, and I can jump in on this too. But this is kind of more about how to properly dress at the office if you really want to focus on movement and activity, because this is something I dealt with for a long time. So I’m just going to go through and read these. Is verbatim, just kind of back to back, because it’s funny. These were submitted a day apart by two complete strangers, but they just work together so well. So, I’m just going to read these verbatim. So, this is first from Paul. I’ve never heard you speak about footwear, other than in passing. I know that you wear vibrams, but why? I understand the basic concepts from Mark Sisson, but what about you? Are you considering any alternatives? Is there anything more client-friendly, and this me, as an aside, like, I don’t know what could possibly be more client-friendly than toe shoes, or are they enough a part of these zeitgeist that people don’t question you? So clearly, there’s a zeitgeist, and that’s supposed to be part of what Jeff Bart coined as my online aura. So I don’t know, but then to move right into the next question from Andrew. He says, “My office recently instigated a new dress code, no shorts allowed. The horror, and as somebody who really appreciated being able to wear shorts during my afternoon walks in the blistering Texas summer, I was wondering if you have any clothing recommendations that look office appropriate but are easier to be active than your typical office apparel. Thankfully, nobody has said anything about my Vibram five fingers yet, but I’d love to know if you have any other clothing items in mind that are like that, highly functional and comfortable, but don’t draw too much attention to the fact that I’m likely to go jogging up and down the stairs in a moment’s notice. Now, like I said, a day apart, and they both mention Vibrams and mention office apparel, so I just had to kind of put these two together, beyond coincidental that these both came up the way that they did. So I first want to talk a little bit about footwear, because this actually came up just today in the Fitness and Post Facebook group. And for anybody listening, I’ll put a link to the group if you want to join, 100% free. We don’t bite usually, but that actually came up just today talking about footwear. So I want to go there first. I know that you have some thoughts about footwear, because that’s a joke that you and I make all the time, is about your edit shoes. And then I’ll go a little bit, a little bit deeper into the clothes as well. Natalie will tell you, anybody that has never seen me in person, I am not the first person you want to talk to about fashion, especially at the workplace. Like, I wear one level above pajamas when I go to work, but that’s very, very deliberate, and there’s a reason that I do that, so I’ll get into that. But first, when it comes to shoes, the most important thing that you need to do if you’re going to be more active in mobile at your workstation is you need to set up a proper foundation for your lower body, and this is something that I go into extensively in the Move Yourself program. I have an entire lesson just about setting up the world for your lower body, but one of the things you have to think about is footwear. Now, I wear vibrance, and if you don’t know what vibrants are, they’re really goofy-looking toe shoes, and you can actually see that somebody is wearing a shoe, but you see all of their toes. Those are the vibrance, and they’re not exactly client-friendly, and they are definitely conversation starters, where I get at least one question a week, if not two, by random people in the hallway. They’ll just kind of be breaking eye contact and looking around in the elevator, and naturally their eyes go to your shoes, and then they look up at you. You’re like, huh? So I can see your toes. Are those comfortable? It’s always the same thing. The reason that I wear Vibrams is because they have what’s called the zero drop heel, they’re minimal shoes, which means that outside of a very, very thin layer of protection, like basically having a rubber sole or a thick rubber sock, they have no protection, I have no heel support, I have no arch support, I have no cushioning whatsoever, and this allows my feet to maintain a more natural structure and form, the way that it’s supposed to be based on hundreds of 1000s of years of evolution, so we haven’t had shoes that have cushions and that have heels the way that we do now. We had nothing like that up until maybe 100 years ago, and I could be getting the time a little bit wrong, but it’s a very small percentage of the history of human evolution. So, if you have arch supports, if you have orthotics, you have all these things, you’re allowing your foot and your legs to weaken. It’s kind of like the idea of if you were walking around on crutches because you broke your leg, you continue to do that for a long period of time, you’re going to start to see certain muscles atrophy, your body’s going to get weaker in certain places, then you get rid of the crutch, and then all of a sudden you have to rebuild those muscles. Basically, all the cushioning in your shoes is like a crutch. It’s almost like a cast. If you broke your arm and you have a cast around it, it’s like having a cast or a crutch. So, if you remove that crutch, at first it’s going to feel really uncomfortable, but as your feet and your legs start to strengthen, you’re going to develop all those connective tissues and all those minor muscle groups and those connective muscles that you need to properly balance and strengthen your feet, and what I found is that years ago, when I first started kind of the idea of standing at a work desk, when I was working at Burn Notice, I stood for 12 to 14 hours a day, I didn’t have a desk chair, I didn’t have a mat, and the floors were basically concrete with a quarter inch of carpet on top of them, and I was in massive pain all day long. I was going to orthopedists, I got orthotics, I was getting x-rays, I couldn’t figure out what was wrong, and the more cushion and the more things that I added under me to support me, the worse that it got. So I heard it was either a podcast. I’d read an article by Mark Sisson, who Paul had mentioned, and I can put a link to Mark Sisson’s website, and I also had him on a podcast a while ago, so I’ll put that in the show notes, but I heard this idea of minimal footwear, and I’m like, I might as well try, so I got the Vibrams, which again have no cushioning, no heel whatsoever, and the years of pain and discomfort that I went through was gone in two weeks, completely gone, and I’ve never experienced it again. But that’s because I have a more natural shoe that’s really allowing my body to stay strong. But that having been said, that doesn’t really answer the question about how can you have something that’s client friendly, and this is something I’ve been researching recently, and you, I was going to say you hadn’t seen that, but you actually, I’d gotten the my newest experimental shoes right before you and I were done with our show, and you’re like, wait, those are new shoes, and I can’t see your toes, your feet look really weird right now. So they’re now companies that are making shoes that are minimal shoes that are zero drop heel, which means there’s no raise to the heel whatsoever, but they still look like normal shoes. So, this is what I look when I need something a little bit dressier, and you don’t see the toe, so it’s not quite the same, but it’s as close as I can get. The ones that I have are called Innovate, so it’s I N O v8 and they’re actually specifically for Cross Fit exercises, but you’d never know they look like dress shoes, and I love them. There’s a couple other companies as well that I’ll link to, I can’t remember them off the top of my head, but if you’re really into trying to do minimal footwear and you want to be comfortable and you want to be active throughout the day, but you don’t want to be walking around the office in gym clothes, that’s where I would start, and I’ll kind of, you know, transition to you, because we always make fun of your edit shoes, so kind of talk to me about the theory behind those.

Natalie Boschan: Yeah, I don’t, I don’t dress as casually as Zack, though I do dress casual at work. I wear whatever I want to wear to work, any shoes, like I’ve got all kinds of shoes that I wear, I got flats, I got heels, I got sometimes I wear flip flops, depends on how I feel in the morning, but when I do wear the heels or flats or just sort of dress shoes, I have what’s called my edit shoes, which are just a pair of Skechers walking shoes, and I basically just put those on through the, you know, and people just kind of get used to it. And what’s funny is, if I wear heels and I go to the office and I’m like five four, someone comes into my office about an hour later and they say, “You shrump today, or if I go to lunch, they say, you grew again. I’m like, yeah, I had to put my head of shoes on. I mean, if you’re gonna stand and people know you’re standing, I don’t think it’s too big of a stretch for them to also see that you’re wearing shoes that you need to be comfortable and to stand. So, if, if they’ve already accepted that you’re standing, it’s not much of a stretch to wear shoes that are also comfortable, and if you don’t want to do the vibrams because the toe thing, or whatever, I mean, Skechers does have a pretty good line of walking shoes, and they are, they’re not no drop heel, but they are pretty minimalist, and they’re really padded and pretty comfortable, and if you have a really nice mat, like the topo mat, plug for the topo mat, sometimes I just go barefoot for a little while, like, honestly, because you’re, I mean, you’re in an edit bay for a while, you’re just by yourself. I’ll just go barefoot for a little bit, but the other thing is, is clothes, and that gets to be an issue, and I can understand for somebody living in Texas who doesn’t want to wear pants when they go for walks in the hot summer, and they can’t wear shorts. I don’t, I don’t know off the top of my head what to do about that, but I generally like, I would do 210 minute exercises twice a week, at least, in the office, because with my training schedule, I just didn’t have time to do any sort of like strength training before work, so I just did during work, and I just wore jeans and a T-shirt that day, like, I just made sure that the clothes that I wore weren’t terribly constrictive or anything like that, and so I did my exercises anyways, and I had deodorant in my purse, and yeah, I mean, you get a little sweaty at work, but it’s sort of, I mean, you can’t have it both ways, like if you’re gonna get a little sweaty at work, like, you know, or, you know, I know women can wear yoga pants, they have like yoga pants now that look dressy, what’s nice is that women, you can also wear like what’s really fashionable now is not necessarily jeans, but like the like sort of more cotton pants with like patterns on them and stuff, and they’re like really comfortable. I call them like one step up from pajama pants, and I would love to buy a pair and wear them to work, because many days when I want to wear pajama pants to work, but there’s like plenty of pants that women can find that are like relatively dressy, and I know that men’s clothes are a little bit baggier, so like you can possibly do exercises in them, but I mean, if you’re really concerned, I would just like bring a change of clothes and lock your door for 10 minutes, you know. Andrew in Texas, you know, bring a change of pants and change in the bathroom into your shorts when you go outside, and then change back for the office. I know it’s a hard thing to sort of mitigate, yeah, but I think that, like, if you’re really concerned about it, just bring a change of clothes and a change of shoes.

Zack Arnold: Well, what I, what I really want people to understand is that it’s not so much about me saying you should use this brand or this brand, it’s more about the mindset. If your mindset is saying I am. Active person, even at my workstation during the day, you need to think about that when you make your clothing decisions, and yes, I am not a fashionista, there’s no question about that, but at the same time, when I’m making my clothing decisions, they’re very deliberate, and the reason is because activity and motion throughout the day fuel my creativity, and I’m not going to walk into an office and allow my creativity and my energy to be stifled just because I’m worried what people think about the way that I look, so an example of that, like this would be a real world concrete tactic that I use is that when I go clothes shopping, which is about once every two years, not very often, I’m not much of a clothes shopper, but when I do, I’m still going to look for things that look nice, so I’m like, for example, I wear cargo pants to work a lot that look kind of like khakis, so it’s not like they’re, you know, I’m walking around and I just look like I’m a total homeless guy, but I’m not wearing things that are restrictive. So one of my criteria is that if this is something I’m going to be editing in during the day, or I’m going to be in front of my workstation, can I do a squat, can I do an air squat? So when I’m trying things on, if they’re too restrictive, and I can’t do an air squat, I’m not going to buy them, so that way I don’t all of a sudden grab them and get in my edit suite and say, “Oh, man, these pants are way too tight in my legs, I can’t move around, because then that just ruins the entire day for me and throws me off my schedule. So, I can’t recommend specific brands, types, but you can get jeans, you can get khakis, you can get cargo pants, all things that, at least in our industry or in creative industries, are going to be acceptable. Like, if I were doing a podcast about being more active as a bank teller at Bank of America, this is going to be a different conversation. But frankly, when is the last time that you walked into a post-production facility and anybody was dressed super nicely, other than maybe the receptionist, like you can really get away with just about anything in this industry. So, just find something that doesn’t make you look homeless, but make sure when you buy it that you can move and it’s not restricted. If you do that and it’s fairly light, you’re going to be able to get away with just about anything, unless you start to really exert yourself heavily in your sweating. But the vast majority of the activities that I do and that I teach, you don’t even break a sweat, so that’s not really an issue for me. I know it is a little bit more for you in your training, but for me that’s not really an issue.

Natalie Boschan: Yeah, like I would do kettlebell swings and squats and lunges and stuff at work, and I just made sure on those days that’s just when I went way more casual, like I would just wear jeans and a T-shirt, and I would just wear leggings, possibly. I think for men, I don’t know if it’s a little bit easier, especially if you, depending on what your dress code is, but I think just because the nature of men’s clothes are just not as tight and they’re just like more baggy, I think you guys have a little bit more latitude, but for women it’s a little bit harder to get away with like super baggy clothes or super non-restrictive clothes, so, like, I see, you know, they have yoga pants now that are sort of like work yoga pants, and they have, you know, you can wear leggings, and you can wear jeans that are a little bit, you know, more comfortable to sort of do a workout in, and yeah, it’s a, I mean, it’s a tough one, because you got to also make it easy for yourself to move around, like, you don’t want to have to think about changing your clothes when you want to move around, but at the same time it’s just sort of a thing that you kind of have to plan for, I guess. Yeah, that’s it’s a hard one, but you kind of do what’s right for you. But I do think for Andrew specifically, I think you can bring a pair of shorts and then change into them. I think that would work.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, again, just to reiterate one more time before we move on, it’s all about a mindset, don’t focus on the specifics. Think about who do I really want to be when I show up at work. If your answer is that I want to be somebody that’s energetic, that’s active, that’s engaged, that’s present, that’s most likely going to require you to be active and be moving. So, if that’s important to you, you’re going to find ways to make that work, as opposed to, well, it’s really important how I look to other people, and I could get these shorts, or I could get these pants, or whatever I need to, and it’s going to make my appearance look better, but I’m going to feel stifled. I can assure you that if the number one goal that you have is to move forwards in your career, to impress people, to get on people’s radar, and climb the ladder wherever you are, being present and being engaged to being focused is going to get you light years ahead rather than worrying about which pants you’re going to wear and stifling your energy because you can’t move around, so really think about resetting your mindset first. Then, once you’ve done that, then think about specifically, all right, what clothing choices can I make? But I’m even when it’s about picking pants, it’s all about mindset for me. It doesn’t matter.

Natalie Boschan: Well, we do have to worry about people that have clients in the bay, like if you have a client coming in, like sometimes you can’t, especially if you’re in the ad business.

Zack Arnold: But even if you’re in the ad business, there’s a certain expectation for what somebody that’s an editor looks like.

Natalie Boschan: Does that contribute to our.. sorry, you better finish. Sorry, go ahead. No,

Zack Arnold: I can actually finish your sentence. Does that contribute to the way that we’re perceived and the way that we’re treated? Absolutely, it does. That kind of flows back into what I was saying, is that if you really bring this back to mindset, and the mindset is that I’m going to be present, active, and engaged, and I’m going to show up, and I’m going to kill it in that room. If you do that, I guarantee. That that client is sitting on the couch is not going to say, “Boy, that guy was amazingly creative, and he had so much energy, and he had so many great ideas, but I can’t work with him again. I mean, the pants, I just can’t do it, like nobody’s going to do that, like someone would do that, somebody might, and if they do, you don’t want to work with them anyway. But, but, but, I mean, thinking about, I mean, you’ve worked with me for years, and you know that I just don’t give a, you know what, I just don’t care, because the only thing I care about is showing up in that room and having somebody walk away and saying that was an experience, he knows his stuff, and he just took everything I asked him to do and he delivered it, but he delivered it better, that’s what people remember, because I am very actively thinking, my mindset is I’m gonna blow them out of the water with my skills. Nobody’s ever said Zach’s good, but I just, the way he dresses, I just, I can’t work with him anymore. Like, I shower, well, you have, of course, but you know, like I have decent human hygiene, I wear pants, I wear a shirt, like, no, it’s not like it’s, you know, like when they come in the edit bay, I had pants on, like, but nobody’s thinking, like, this guy’s just a slovenly mess, and he can’t cut for me, so you can still present yourself and look really, really nice, but still move and be active, so it’s just all about your mindset and believing that this is who you are, this is what you’re gonna bring. Then make your clothing choices accordingly, and make sure that you can move. It’s really that simple,

Natalie Boschan: Right?

Zack Arnold: So, as long as we’re kind of talking about this idea of movement, we started first with like recovery and marathons, and what do you do afterwards, and now we’re talking about movement and what you should be wearing, and then, of course, God forbid, I can’t go one episode without talking about purpose and mission and mindset, like just I can’t get in the weeds and just talk about the little stuff. But anyway, as long as we’re kind of talking about the idea of movement, I want to go to this next question, which is a different level of movement and fitness at the workplace. And this is from Deb, and Deb asks, What are the best things in ways that a night AE can incorporate fitness into their schedule. Walking around at night isn’t exactly safe, and they don’t have their own workstations, typically. So, I want to start with you, and then I have some ideas, both about movement, but also just about the idea of working a graveyard shift in general. But I can’t speak from a place of experience. I’ve never, in my entire life, worked the night shift to any job that’s by choice, and there are very specific reasons for that, but I know that you have, so why don’t you talk a little bit about some of the challenges that you’ve run into working night work, and how you would suggest kind of getting around this idea of being at just a random workstation and you can’t go outside and it’s dark, so I’ll let you start, and then I’ll piggyback off of

Natalie Boschan: It. Yeah, I worked the night shift for a few months in reality TV. What I really liked about it, actually, because I was totally a night person, for I mean, I still kind of am, but I didn’t like working at night, but it was kind of conducive to the rhythm I was already in, which was that I could just wake up, so my shift was 6:30pm till 3:30am and that’s actually a really doable shift. If you have a shift that starts at like midnight and goes till 8am like a true, true, like third shift, night shift, that’s a little bit more difficult. But I feel like one that’s more typical is one that starts at like 630 7o’clock goes to maybe 330 maybe five. So, what I would do is I would work right, so if we start, so I work my night hours, I’d get up probably, so I get home maybe about 4am and what I do is I’d like, I wouldn’t really watch TV to go to sleep, I would sort of read or kind of like just do things that were quiet, you know, to like just bring myself down a little bit, because you do need that hour to sort of like bring yourself down from like driving and from just the work and everything that’s stressful about working a night shift. So, I would say take like an hour to calm down a little bit, and then I’d get up at like maybe noon or 1pm and so between 1pm and 6:30pm I have five and a half hours during the day to do all kinds of stuff, so I would get up, I’d go for a run, I’d run my errands, and do all of the things that you can’t do when people say, “Hey, can we do this between 9am and 5pm? and you’re like, “No, I work, but if you’re working in the night shift, you can, so I actually found it really nice to be able to like do all of that stuff during the day, and I found it a lot easier to just get a workout in beforehand, because it is during the day. I understand it’s really difficult if you say you’re working till 7am and you don’t get home till like eight, and then you’re not in bed till 10am and then you know everyone’s already starting their day, and you’ve got to be back at work in eight hours, and so that’s really, do that, that’s a really difficult shift to do, and depending on your neighborhood, like, no, it probably isn’t safe to be walking around at night. I stupidly did it when I worked at Hollywood and Highland, but I figured there were people around, like, I would be okay, but that is probably pretty stupid of me, but yeah, I think I. I actually liked it because I could actually take advantage of some of those daytime hours and actually do a workout and do that, I think, for not, I mean, as much as like you move workstations around, like at least I would think that you would know the people coming in and out a little bit, and you can kind of find a place for your exercise stuff if it’s not too much of it, like a little corner that you can sort of call your own, maybe you can bring in your own little, like, cubby or something, and put it in a corner, or if you share an office, maybe your office mate will be nice to sort of let you keep your exercise equipment in the office with it. I think if you like ask people, or you ask your producer, or somebody, you might find that they’re a little bit more amenable to you putting your stuff in a community space than you might think, so I think I think it’s definitely doable to just ask and find out if it’s okay, or you know, if you’ve been there for a long time and you just know that it’s okay to leave your stuff there, and you’re, you trust the person, you know, you trust the daytime shift. I think it’s very doable to just sort of leave it there during the day, so yeah, I think I think it’s, you know, if you can try your best to sort of establish a nighttime routine. I love my nighttime routine of sort of just being like quiet, like making like quieting your brain. This creates that it’s funny because I do that a lot, like I quiet, like I do that a lot, I quiet my brain, I drink my tea, I read, and that’s sort of my nighttime routine I’ve gone over before on the podcast, but what happened was, my, I think it was last week, the editor I’m working for now, he asked me to think about a scene, he says we have this thing in a scene, can you think about it, and I said okay, and I really wanted to like make an impression, so I was like, and I realized that, like, I got home late, I made dinner, and then all of a sudden I’m going through my night routine, and as I’m sitting in bed, I was like, I haven’t thought about the scene, so all of a sudden, at like midnight, I started thinking about the scene, and it was impossible for me to fall asleep, like, impossible, because I just turned my brain back on, and then it just started going and going and going and going, and I had this realization that I was like, “Oh my god, I’ve learned how to turn my brain off at night. I can’t be doing this stuff, like I have to have a time when I’m actually like, my brain is on, because I know how to actually turn it off. So I think if you like get into a routine of figuring out how to shut your brain off, and like I said, reading is a good thing for that, like hot tea or just something that calms you down, and like, unfortunately, television isn’t one of those things, because like that actually engages you, and like video games engage you, which like it’s great thing to do when you’re relaxing and you’re gonna have a Saturday afternoon off, and like those are so much fun to do, like I work in television, I love television, but when you’re trying to go to bed it’s just not the best thing to do when you’re going to bed, and if you really are concerned with, like, getting to bed after your nighttime shift, doing the things that are more conducive to sleep and shutting your brain off is going to help you out a lot more, and then you can wake up, use your daytime hours a little bit better, and then go back to work. So, I think it all starts with having that sort of nighttime routine to actually get you to bed.

Zack Arnold: All right. Well, I’ve got a bunch of stuff that I want to riff on here, because even though I have not done a night shift, like I said, it’s very much by choice, and that’s partly because I know how detrimental working a grave geoshift can be to your health, and I just refuse to do it. But I have done pretty extensive research into this, because I’m going to be putting together another program in the near future. I’m not going to say too much, but I’m, I’m moving on, and I’m going to be adding more to the idea of movement, and I’m now doing extensive research into the world of sleep, and this is something that I’m looking into a lot, because it’s a very common question I get, is what do I do if I’m working the night shift. So this question is really specifically about how do I stay active if I’m working the night shift, so I’m going to go into a couple of those, but one thing I want to mention specifically first that I’ve recently discovered, which is pretty terrifying, is that if you are chronically working a night shift, so regardless of the number of hours that you’re sleeping, if you’re working a night shift and you’re sleeping during the day, working the graveyard shift chronically has now been classified as a class two A carcinogen, so that means that it actually causes cancer, and it’s really, really, really bad for you. And I’m not going to get extensively into the science, because I’m still putting together research, and I’m kind of in the preliminary stages, but this

Natalie Boschan: Is research on heart disease, too.

Zack Arnold: Oh, yeah. No, it’s not only heart disease, but it’s basically amplifying any genetic expression that you have, whether it’s towards diabetes, whether it’s toward heart disease, breast cancer, kind of whatever genetic expressions that you have, because everybody has certain genetic codes that are going to give them more of a propensity towards a specific kind of disease. We all have it. The question is, are we going to express it through our environment or through our behaviors? You’re basically just throwing gasoline on the fire if you’re working a graveyard shift. So, if you’re thinking, well, I’m getting eight hours of sleep, the time that you’re getting sleep during the day or during the night matters immensely to proper hormone function, and we’re going to be learning more about the. Because I just recorded a podcast about this with one of the foremost experts in the entire field on the subject, but the idea is that your hormones are going to go haywire. So the first question I want you to ask, even before we kind of go into the specifics, is whatever service you’re providing right now working the graveyard shift, is it worth taking years off of your life, and that’s not metaphorical, that’s actually scientifically what’s happening. Is chronically working at night is taking years off of your life, it’s shortening your lifespan, and it’s going to give you more of a propensity to be sick and have disease as you age towards that shorter lifespan. So, first, I want you to ask that question.

Natalie Boschan: When you say chronically, do you mean like for five years, 10 years, or because there’s a lot of people who do night shift for maybe two years, and that’s that’s a long time to be in a night shift in this industry. I feel

Zack Arnold: We’re talking about these effects start to stack up after like a month.

Natalie Boschan: Oh, Jesus,

Zack Arnold: So it’s not like you’re going to shorten your lifespan by 10 years if you work a night shift for a month, but the point is that it doesn’t take years for these to stack up if you’re sleep deprived, even for a couple of days, or you’re off your natural circadian rhythms. All of these things are going to start to stack up. So, like I said, I’m not going to go deep into it, because this is for another show, and it’s – I’ve got a lot of content that’s going to be coming out soon about this subject. The general kind of idea here is that working a graveyard shift and not sleeping well is way worse than anybody thinks, and you really need to rethink your lifestyle if that’s a choice that you’ve made, and is the job that you’re providing worth it. But that having been said, to answer Deb’s question specifically, she’s asking about movement and how can she maintain her fitness working a night shift, and there’s three specific things that I want to bring up. The first of which is that if you’re at a workstation that you’re most likely sharing with somebody, you’re not going to be able to bring a whole bunch of tools, and you mentioned that you can probably talk to them, and kind of find a place to put a couple of things, and that’s fine, but I want to assume that you can’t set up anything, I want to make it the worst conditions possible, and just assume if you can solve that problem, you can solve any problem, so let’s just assume you are sitting at the workstation of a total that refuses to let you do anything. How are you going to solve that problem? Because if you’re not, then it gets infinitely easier. There are three things that I would recommend. The first of which is that you need to start drinking a ton of water, because water is at least going to help not mitigate or reduce, but it’s at least going to flush some of the toxins that your body is creating when you’re working a night shift, but the reason I say drinking a lot of water is because this is one of my greatest and funnest hacks for moving more, because the more you drink water, the more you got to get up and go to the bathroom, nobody’s going to stop you if you say, if I don’t pee in two minutes, there’s going to be a puddle on the floor, and they’re not going to say get back to your workstation, they’re going

Natalie Boschan: To pull, maybe you’re fine,

Zack Arnold: Maybe, maybe, if it’s that bad, for the love of God, quit your job and find another one like that, that’s where you got to draw the line, but that’s the first thing I would do, is that you start drinking a lot of water, you’re going to flush some of those toxins, it’s going to force you to move more, and then stacking on top of that. So, this is a concept called habit stacking. You build your first habit, which is you’re drinking your water. The second habit is that any time you get up to go to the bathroom, take five minutes, find an empty stairwell, find an empty hallway, especially if you’re working a night shift, there aren’t going to be a lot of people around, find an empty corner of the cubicle area, whatever it is, and just take five minutes to do whatever activities you want, like do your air squats, do your push-ups, do burpees, do whatever it is that you need to do to keep your body moving and fresh, but it’s going to be so much easier to do it discreetly because it’s at night and it’s dark, so you can stack those two habits on top of each other, and then the third one, which kind of goes along with the idea of trying to mitigate the effects of working and being up at night, is that you need to be moving during the day and get out in sunlight as much as possible before you start that night shift, so that is something that you can do, like you said, you had five hours to do whatever you wanted, use some of that time to be active, and that doesn’t mean you have to go out and do px every single day, but one of the ways that you can kind of maintain some sense of a circadian rhythm when you’re working a graveyard shift is light hacking, you can make sure that you’re exposing yourself to the kind of light that you would be exposed to on a natural circadian rhythm, so that means that when you’re awake during the day, get as much sunlight and blue light spectrum as possible, and then at night, when you are working the graveyard shift, get away from as much of the blue light spectrum as you can. So try to surround yourself with dim lights with red lights and turn off all the blue light spectrums on your monitor, if that’s possible. If you’re somebody that’s doing color correction, well, you’re just sol, there’s nothing you can do about that, but most likely you’re not doing advanced color correction on a night shift, so you’re probably digitizing, logging, breaking stuff down, you’re doing fairly menial tasks. All you need to do is get a program that’s called Flux, just get flux.com F L U X, it’s free to install, and it’s going to eliminate all of the blue light spec. Term from your monitor, so that way what you’re going to do when you do get home is you’re not going to be nearly as wired or awake, because you’re already calming your body down, because you haven’t surrounded yourself with very bright lights with the blue light spectrum that’s just making all the activity centers in your brain fire like fireworks, so if you really try to actively think about the type of light that you’re exposing yourself to, that’s going to help, and then the other thing that you have to do is when you’re sleeping, what, let’s say that you’re sleeping from, I don’t know, 5am to noon, whatever it is, you need to be in a room that’s as black as humanly possible, like it should be so dark you can’t see your hand in front of your face, that’s going to help reset your circadian rhythms and allow you to get deep restorative REM sleep, that’s going to get you all the way down to the delta waves and the theta waves that are going to make your sleep restorative, and it’s not going to help the fact that your hormones are still going to be messed up because you’re sleeping at the wrong times of day, but you can get as close to normal as possible if you’re trying to make sure that you’re exposing yourself to the right kind of light as you would be if you were awake during a normal day, so those are the things that I would focus on if I were going to do late night shift work to try and stay as active and as healthy as possible. So, all that having been said, we are now officially out of time. I don’t want this to go too long, but once again, it has been an immense pleasure to connect with you, and I’m really tempted to find an editing job right now, just so you and I can hang out. Not that I would ask you to leave the job you are at now, because it’s pretty awesome, and I can’t tell anybody what is, but it’s pretty cool. But I’m just.. I’m kind of bored. I’m like, I need somebody at 3o’clock in the afternoon to bother and make fun of, and like it’s lonely here, so

Natalie Boschan: I know I miss you. It’s bits, I mean, I, you know, I love the people I work with, but it’s, uh, yeah, no, it would, it would be fun if you were there, but be fun.

Zack Arnold: We will get the band back together soon enough. Yes, so anyway, I hope that this has been tremendously helpful. And once again, if you have any questions, just go ahead, please submit them. I’ll have all the information at the beginning of the show and at the end of the show, but we want your questions. We enjoy this. We want to keep doing this. We want to make sure we’re addressing the things that are going to help you. So, please go ahead, submit your questions, and I’m going to let you get back to your life,

Natalie Boschan: You too, more of your course and all that stuff.

Episode Credits

This episode was edited by Curtis Fritsch, the show notes were prepared by Jakin Rintelman, and this show is 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.