Episode Highlights

• How Ryan’s background in martial arts inspired his passion for daily movement
• Learning to manage chronic pain and finding proper chiropractic help
• The origin of Startstanding.org
• Short-term vs. Long-term solutions for back pain
• How sitting poorly can negate all of your positive lifestyle choices
• Finding a chiropractor/massage therapist who will assess you individually
• Adjusting your sleeping habits to improve your chronic pain
• Avoiding the common errors of adjusting to a standing workstation
• Using the pain/pleasure principle to assess your fitness goals
• Focusing on cognitive and creative functionality more than simply body image

About Guest

Ryan Fiorenzi has been training in the martial arts since he was young, has a black belt in Kung Fu and a 4th degree black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. After sustaining a back injury training in Judo, he suffered with back pain for over 8 years. After a lot of research and experimentation, he’s now pain free, which lead him to create startstanding.org.

Transcript

Zack Arnold: I’m here today with Ryan Fiorenzi, and this is such a cool episode for me personally, because this is one of those instances where weird stuff just happens in the universe, and you don’t have to believe in the universe or any of that other stuff, but you and I magically came back together after having not spoken to each other for almost 15 years. Ryan is my former Brazilian Jiu Jitsu instructor from my days at college in Michigan. So, Ryan, it is a pleasure to have you on the show today.

Ryan Fiorenzi: I’m excited to be here. Yeah, it’s great to reconnect with you, and I love what you’re doing with your whole project. It’s just awesome. I think it’s really needed.

Zack Arnold: Well, that’s the funny thing that I want to tell people before we get started. It’s kind of the.. it’s totally tangential to what we’re going to talk about, but I think it’s important that people understand how we got back together. So, about a month ago, I was solicited through my website contact form from somebody that works with you on your website, Start standing.org and they didn’t know who I was, or they didn’t even know that we knew each other, and they had said, “Listen, we have this really cool calculator, where it kind of tells you how many calories you’re burning when you’re standing versus when you’re sitting, and we see that you’re really into the same ideals. We’d love to talk about this more, and I’m like, oh, all right, I usually get a lot of these types of solicitations now, but I’ll check it out. I went on the website, and I’m thinking, oh, this is pretty cool, I really like what they’re doing here. And then I went to the about page, and I saw your picture, and my jaw dropped. I’m like, you gotta be kidding me. Like, this is crazy that she contacted me, having no idea that you and I had a background, and immediately I just furiously emailed directly. Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, like I can’t believe this is Ryan, and we have to get in contact, and I have to talk to you. And then I started reading your blog, and I say this in the best way possible. I swear to God, we’ve plagiarized each other’s work. It was like we’re doing the exact same thing without having any idea that the other person was doing it. Your site is all about why you need to be moving more throughout the day, and why you need to be standing, and just all the horrible health problems that come from being sedentary all day long, I’m like, this is downright creepy right now.

Ryan Fiorenzi: Yeah, it’s pretty amazing. We came to the same conclusions, we came about it, I think, different ways. I mean, mine was through the martial arts, and actually, I’m a lifelong martial artist. I love Brazilian jiu, so I’ve been trained since martial arts since 87 and then Brazilian jiu jitsu since 94 I’m still addicted to it, but I actually got injured doing judo, and that’s what led me to the back problems, and that, what that’s what led me to the Start Standing project. And you came about through your lifestyle with the with the editing and all the work that you’ve been doing, but it’s amazing that we came to the same conclusions through very different paths.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and it’s really is kind of crazy. So anybody that is listening, I would invite you to go visit Start standing.org and read a couple of Ryan’s blog posts, and if you’re a regular reader of fitness and posts, you’re going to be like, okay, this is just weird, like it is, so it’s crazy. But anyway, I want to talk more about kind of the journey that you went through, especially with finding the website, dealing with back pain, that’s kind of going to be the crux of our conversation today, but where I really want to start is just understanding a little bit more about you and your background, kind of how you found martial arts, what it’s done for you, because martial arts is a huge component of who I am as a person. And full disclaimer, I haven’t regularly practiced really since college, which I’m kind of embarrassed to say. Once you’ve had the best, and you’re by far the best martial arts instructor I ever worked with. Yeah, of course, but once you’ve gone to a nice steak dinner, you just don’t want to eat McDonald’s anymore. And I tried out a couple of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu dojos in Los Angeles, and it was just kind of a bunch of meat heads and knuckleheads, and I’m like, like, it’s that’s not really what I’m looking for, so just tell me a little bit about your own personal journey, and then I want to segue into what martial arts can really do for a person outside of, well, it will help me if I get mugged, and it will make me stronger.

Ryan Fiorenzi: Well, I basically, it sounds kind of funny or cheesy, but I was a kid, and I saw The Karate Kid, and I thought mr. Miyagi was pretty cool, and then there was a show from the 70s with David Carradine in it, called Kung Fu, and I always had this impression that these martial art guys, there was something about them that was just different, there was a peace, there was a calm calmness, there was a confidence that I wanted for myself. They seemed to know things that other people didn’t know, so I started training when I was 13, and the good thing about training at that point is, I started training six days a week. I became addicted, and if you’re going to get addicted to anything, I think martial arts is probably the best thing, one of the best things, because teenagers screw around with drinking and drugs and screwing around, and I didn’t get into trouble. I was like beaver cleaver, because all I wanted to do was train martial arts, and I was hanging out with my kung fu instructor Sifu Rob Brown, and he was talking to me about how do you live your life with more discipline and more focus and more patience, how to, you know, always improve your life, how to learn to analyze what you’re doing and how it’s affecting your life. So it was almost like there was a lot of personal development in the martial arts that we were doing, because it wasn’t just, you know, the current. Trend of martial arts, a lot of it is focused on MMA, which is a sport, which is getting in the cage and beating someone up, which is great. There’s a lot of good things about that, but I think when you look at martial arts as an art form, it’s not just about winning, losing, you know, getting a medal or a trophy or making some money, but it’s about how you live your life on a day-to-day basis, and are you happier, are you improving, are you growing, and so that’s kind of how my kung fu instructor trained me to think and live, and so it’s kind of been a habit for me ever since I was a kid to analyze what am I doing, how is this going to affect me, how is this going to affect others, am I moving towards my goals? I’ve been addicted to martial arts ever since, and it’s kind of led me into this, I’ve heard people use the term life hacking, that they’re looking at different things they could do in their lives to improve their sleep, improve their diet, improve just any aspect of their life, their finances. And so I’ve been really big into that for years, and actually now a lot of my friends are into it. And so we’re kind of this support group for each other, where we’re just trying to move forward, keep improving. And so with the martial arts, I had trained, dedicated for probably it was, I think, five or six years before I got my first black belt, and then I started doing Barzolin Jiu Jitsu in college. I got completely addicted to that. I got my blue belt from Hoist Gracie back in 1996 which was for the people that don’t know, he was the Gracie family are the ones that started the Ultimate Fighting Championship, and he was the one that was 180 pounds, he was beating up guys that were 260 and muscle built, and he’s a skinny guy, smaller guy, tapping everyone out, so he kind of really exposed the world to Brazil and Jiu Jitsu. So I got my blue belt from him, started my martial art school after that, everything was going great, I was over training, you know, teaching six, sometimes seven days a week, twice a day, which, when you’re 2223 not a huge deal, but you get into your 30s and your 40s, and you can’t quite do that anymore. But the issue that I had was in 2007 I have a judo program at my school, and the judo instructor is great. The program was great, but there was one day, there was a girl I was dating that was actually in class. I don’t date students, it was only happened one time, but it was my birthday, and she told the instructor, ‘Hey, it’s Ryan’s birthday today. And he goes, ‘Oh, great. He goes, ‘We have a judo tradition, everyone gets to throw you. And I just had this sinking feeling, you know, I’m a meditator, and I know that I should listen to my intuition. I had this feeling something was really wrong, and I should have listened to it. He said, everyone in the room gets to throw you, and one of the women in class said, I’m gonna throw you with Tayo Toshi, and I said, please don’t do that, I always get hurt in that throat. No, no, you’ll be fine. She threw me, it hurt, whatever. And then the instructor said, okay, I’m gonna throw you with Kata Garuma, which Kata Guruma is like when you see a fireman carry someone outside of a house burning building with them on their shoulders, that’s what he did. He picked me up over his head and slammed me, and my ability to take a break fall was generally pretty good, but when I hit the floor, my groin actually hurt, and it wasn’t from my legs smacking together, it just.. I took such a bad fall. It was a few months after that I started developing some pretty severe back pain, so probably three weeks out of every year, for the next till about 2015 I couldn’t walk, which, being a professional martial artist doing martial arts full time, is really, really difficult, you know. I teach kids classes, adult classes, private lessons, seminars, and when you can’t walk, you can’t do anything. So I’d have to call friends if I was teaching a seminar and I was having a bad day. The times that I wasn’t in severe pain, I was afraid of the pain coming back, because I generally had some kind of, at least minor pain, but I kind of lived in fear, and I didn’t like that, so I didn’t look at surgery as an option. My cousin got back surgery, and he’s permanently, I don’t want to say disabled, but he walks like he’s an 80 year old man, and he’s in his late 40s, and I’ve seen every other person I’ve seen that got back surgery, they haven’t gotten better, they seem to be permanently worse. I thought, well, I’m not getting back surgery, I got to find some other options, and I, I went to different chiropractors. After a while, I kind of gave up hope. The only time I seemed to feel better is when I did yoga, and that seemed to help a bit, but I, it just wasn’t getting to the root of the problem. So my wife is from Colombia, and we were doing a trip to Colombia, and my mother-in-law said there was this guy in the news that is a miracle worker, he is fixing people’s backs, there’s people that can’t walk, they go into his office, they do a two hour session, and they run out of his office, they can pick people up, run around, so I thought, well, it’s worth a try. It’s expensive, it costs almost three grand, but I went in there and he did an evaluation on me and said, “Yeah, I can help you. And we set up four sessions. The first two sessions, he beat the hell out of me. I don’t want to go into too many details about the words, but he basically strapped me to like a large massage table with weightlifting straps and started twisting and contorting me in the most violent way possible. In fact, my wife said, “Can I stick around, watch? And he said, “If you want your husband to get better, you’re going to want to leave, because I was screaming. The first session was about an hour and a half, so. Concession was about an hour and a half, and he beat the hell out of me the whole time. So, normally, like in Brazilian jiu, so if you get put in what’s called a submission, it’s a choke hold or a joint lock. Anything starts to hurt, you tap out. It’s like saying uncle, and this guy, you know, strapped me to the table, starts slamming my feet over my head, I’m screaming, I’m thinking, well, I can tap out and he’ll stop, but he kept going, so he was actually manually adjusting different parts of my body. My ribs moved, my collarbones moved, my hips moved, my neck was off center. He moved that back, and after an hour and a half, the first session, I was so tired and beat up, and he said, “You’re about 80% better. We had done before pictures and did after pictures, and you could actually see the difference of the before and after, so even though it was really, really painful, that was kind of my start in fixing my back. Now, from there, he said, “All I want you to do is, we did our two sessions, then he showed me some stretches. He said, “All I want you to do is do these two or three stretches every day, morning and night, for the rest of your life, you’ll be fine. He said, “Don’t go to a chiropractor, they don’t know what they’re doing. Just do what I told you. Listen to your body, wear the right footwear, walk a lot, and you’ll be good. So I got home for two months, I was great, I had zero pain. And then slowly the pain started creeping back. I tried to get a hold of him, he gave me some more stretches. It just wasn’t a permanent fix. So my wife had heard about a chiropractor, actually in your old hometown in Ann Arbor. His name was Dr. Rose, and we heard he was the best. So I went out to see him, and what he did with me was something that I’ve seen probably 20 chiropractors over the years, and no one else did what he did. He sat me down and he said, “Well, how do you work? I said, “Well, I sit on a lazy boy with my laptop. He goes, “You know, that’s the worst thing for your back. Your spine is so out of position. You’re, you’re crouching your head forward, you’re leaning forward, your spine is out of alignment. You’re doing that hours a day. It’s absolutely terrible. He said, “Let’s, let’s get you on the scale here. He measured, did all kinds of measurements, and said, “Do you know that you need orthotics? Like, I had no idea. He goes, you have flat feet, and so a lot of your back pain is actually from your feet. So I had always blamed jiu jitsu for my pain, because I thought, well, if my back was bothering me, it’s probably because I trained hard yesterday. But walking was actually worse for me, and standing was worse than doing jiu jitsu. So that one simple fix, starting to wear orthotics, it took care of probably 50 60% of my pain right off the bat. So, that was an amazing discovery. He then sat me down and said, I’m gonna test your range of motion for most of the muscles in your body, and I’m gonna test your strength for most muscles in your body. I was kind of surprised. He told me you’re strong in certain areas, but you’re kind of undeveloped in other areas, and I thought just because I lift weights twice a week for years, and I’ve been doing Brazil and Jiu Jitsu and other stand-up martial arts, that I was strong, but I had some weaknesses, and he said, when you have an imbalance in one area, the rest of your body is going to compensate by trying to overcompensate, so certain muscles are going to not be doing their job, so other muscles are going to have to work harder to fix what the other ones are not doing, so he got me on a program of strengthening certain muscles, and that was kind of the beginning of the end of my back pain. I realized when I looked at my couch, I had this old, really comfortable couch that, you know, if I trained and taught hard all day, I’d go home, lay down on the couch, and the couch was the cushions were old, so my spine was actually bent while I was laying there for an hour or two, so I had to get rid of the couch, I got rid of all my furniture, I mean it was a complete life overhaul, and my back just started getting better and better. Previous to going to Columbia and meeting Dr. Mota, I did start doing the foundation program, and I’m a huge believer in that. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of that, Zack.

Zack Arnold: Well, it’s crazy that you just brought that up, because I had never heard of it until 48 hours ago, and somebody just messaged me about it out of the blue, and I looked at it and I said I have to learn more about this, and now you mentioned it, so the universe is telling me it is time to look at this program. That’s crazy.

Ryan Fiorenzi: It’s meant to be. That program is amazing. That was one of my students who was 49 years old, lifelong athlete, wrestler, actually been doing karate since he was a kid. He was in such bad back pain that he was in the hospital. Someone else had told me about it, but I told him, why don’t you check out this foundation program? He started doing the exercises, which foundation is basically like yoga modified for your back, for a healthy back, and a few months later, he competed in the Pan Ams in Brazil and Jiu Jitsu in one. He said he had never felt better than his entire life. So, one of my students had told me about foundation, said, “This is incredible. I started doing it, and my back pain actually went away for a few months. It slowly creeped back up, because I think the foundation was actually really helping me get better alignment, your strength in your posterior chain, which is the biggest muscle chain in the body, and it’s very important that your back be strong. You know, when you’re a kid, you want to go to the gym and do the vanity muscles, the beach muscles, work your chest and your biceps, your triceps, and your shoulders, but your back is actually really, really important. A friend of mine is. Personal trainer, and he said, yeah, you should be doing twice as many back workouts as you’re doing your beach muscles. So, anyways, I started doing the foundation workout, and it was great. I’ve told a lot of people about it, they’ve had great results, but I think the issue for me was foundation was helping me, but then when I’m laying on a bad couch, my couch was hurting me, when I’m not wearing orthotics, and I’m walking, or I’m standing for a long period of time, that’s putting stress on my back. When I’m walking in my front door, and I’m letting the door slam me in the back on the hip, you know, there’s little things like that you don’t realize, you’re actually, you’re hurting yourself, sitting at a computer all day. You know, I, when I’m not teaching, I’ve got a lot of projects I’m always working on, and I was sitting down on that lazy boy and bending my head forward, looking down at the screen, and I’m doing damage all day. So, you can do things to help your back, but if you’re doing other things to hurt yourself, you know it’s like smoking all day and then going for a run at night, and you figure gonna undo all of it. You’re hurting yourself and you’re helping yourself. So, the way I came in to start standing was after I made all these changes, it took probably about nine months before I got kind of a routine of everything that I was doing, you know, like one of the things I started doing, I was reading articles, was an inversion table. So, for those of you that don’t know, in an inversion table, you’re flipping upside down, you don’t have to be perpendicular to the floor, as Dr. Rose told me, but you’re flipping upside down, so your spine is actually decompressing, and that can actually be really good for your back. Now, I wasn’t doing it correctly, I was just kind of hanging like a bat upside down. My Dr. Rose said, you don’t need to go 90 degrees, you can go like 45 degrees or even less. The fact that you’re upside down is going to decompress your spine, you can press your lower back into the table, and it’s going to help adjust. It’s like a self-adjustment, so, so, doing things like that. It took me about nine months to get into a groove, and then I thought, why didn’t I know any of this stuff before? I’ve seen probably 20 different chiropractors, why didn’t they tell me? They’re experts, and I’m not saying they’re bad chiropractors, but you know, a lot of them would say, well, you’re a mess, I don’t know how you can move around, why didn’t they tell me that all these basic things I was doing was helping me, that they would say, “Well, we want to see you two or three days a week, you know, probably the rest of your life, and I’m like, “It just didn’t feel like a good long-term solution to me. So I started to start standing, because there’s a lot of misinformation out there, and even, you know, my wife used to be a physical therapist, and I said, “So, here, you know, I’ve been thinking about getting a standing desk. A friend of mine suggested that’s a good idea, and she goes, “Well, you know, your back’s bothering you, and you got bad knees, so you know that might really tire you out. I don’t know if that’s gonna be a good option for you. She was a physical therapist, and she used to be, and she told me that. So, I just decided to dive in head first to really research this thoroughly to see, is standing all day a good option? Is sitting all day, you know? How does this all work? And I thought, why isn’t this common knowledge? Because I didn’t have to go through eight years of pain. Now, when one of my students says, “Oh, my, my back’s really hurting, you know, I’m limping around, I said, “Well, I’m not a doctor, but where’s your pain at? What’s going on? What happened? One of the simplest fixes is actually getting a massage, and I’m not talking about a fluffy go to the mall and you walk out, it feels great. I’m talking about a painful, they’re going to find the muscle spasms in your body, and they’re going to work them out, usually with their elbow or their form. My wife actually used to be, she’s kind of super woman, she’s got a lot of skills, but she used to be a massage therapist, also. And we first started dating, I was doing one of my routines where I was in pain, and I was walking around like an 80-old man. I was bent forward, I couldn’t straighten my back out. It was probably after driving to go see her. When I was in pain, I couldn’t drive more than 20 minutes, or I’d be in a lot of pain. She lived two hours away, so I’d show up on limping, and she said, “You know, the problem’s probably in your glutes. I’m like, no, no, my, my pain is in my lower back. She said, yeah, the issue is your glutes, your glutes are too tight. She said, lay on the massage table. She dropped her elbow into my into my glutes, and I was in so much pain, I was trying not to curse. After about 15 minutes of her working on my glutes, I stood up and I started walking like a normal person. I thought, oh my gosh, this is amazing. So it’s one of the things that I do as part of my routine as a professional martial artist, still training a lot and teaching. I get massages about one every two weeks, and I had to go through a lot of different massage therapists to find ones that were good. A lot of massage therapists are fine, just like any profession, there’s going to be 60% are fine, there’s probably 10% that are terrible, and there’s going to be another 10% that are just incredible, so I had to look for that 10% that I could tell them, listen, I’m having pain in my lower right side, can we find the issue? So they have to go through my glutes, my hips. For me, the IT band is oftentimes an issue, and for those of you that do CrossFit, you’re probably real familiar with foam rolling. This is something I do probably once or twice a week, so I get out a foam roller. You’re laying on this, it could be foam or a PVC pipe covered with foam. I’ve got these really gnarly, nasty, they got big bumps on them, foam rollers that they really dig into your IT band, and they

Zack Arnold: Know the rumble roller. I got one of those too. I love it.

Ryan Fiorenzi: Yeah. And it’s basically my whole experience with back pain is I was dealing with like pretty much constant pain, occasionally debilitating, or I can deal with small minor pain occasionally from a massage from the foam roller to get rid of these spasms to release the tension, so now I don’t have tension in my back, if I start doing the foam rolling and I can feel a lot of tension in my IT band. It hurts when I roll, then I’m like, “Oh, my back’s starting to act up. I really got to work on this thing, or I need to go get a massage, and they’re going to find the spot – the hips, the glutes, the IT bands, which it sounds like, why would your lower back hurt, but you would work on a different area. But everything’s connected in the body, it’s like a series of pulleys, and everything’s interconnected. So you need to find a good massage therapist that’s going to find the source of your problem, and a really good one. One of them that I see is she’s actually a kinesiologist, as well as a massage therapist, and so she’ll give me stretches. She’ll say, you know, your lats are super tight. I’m like, oh, she’s like, laying your back, put your arm over your head, my elbow is so far away from my head. She said, you need to do this stretch for your lats, this stress for your chest. I go home, I do the stretch, my back is popping when I’m stretching my chest, I’m like, huh, this is interesting. So this has been a real learning process for me, and that’s why I started start standing, because I thought this should be common knowledge, you know. We both written a lot about sitting. My main motivation for standing was to fix my posture and to not aggravate my back, but it turns out there’s so many other benefits to not being sedentary for hours a day. I mean, there’s, you know, you can read on either of our websites about the increased chances of type two diabetes, cardiovascular disease, there’s certain types of cancer, early mortality. It’s, it’s absolutely incredible. So, now that’s a big part of my routine, is when I’m working, I’ll work for 20 minutes, half hour, I’ll get up, I’ll move around, I’ll go get some water, I’ll switch to standing for a while. I don’t recommend standing all day, you kind of, kind of find your own comfort point, you might start getting really tired, cool, sit back down, do that for a while, stand back up, so you’re alternating throughout the day. You may find yourself a little bit more tired at the end of the day. I actually sleep a little bit better since I’ve been standing, but I feel stronger, and I have more energy. There was a guy, Dan Voice – I’m not sure to pronounce his name – he’s a writer for New Yorker, and he wrote a great article. I would suggest you check out. He did a 30 day standing experiment. He didn’t sit down. I don’t know if you, if you’ve read this article, Zack, but

Zack Arnold: I haven’t. No, but I’m very interested, and I’ll make sure to put a link in the show notes as well.

Ryan Fiorenzi: Oh my gosh, so for 30 days he didn’t sit down, except for I think going to the bathroom and sleeping. He went to a movie theater with his wife, he’d stand the whole time, he’d go to dinner, he stood the whole time. And the first few days, I think the first week, he was in a lot of pain, his calves were cramping up, but he said by the end of the month that he had the most productive month work-wise that he’s ever had. He had more energy, he lost a few pounds. So, standing is actually a pretty incredible thing. And I’ve read there’s some people, some experts have said that in the future there’s going to be fines for offices that don’t give their employees an option for standing, which I think is pretty significant. And we’re not there yet. This information is not common knowledge, but I think the more that people like you and I are having conversations about it and sharing, and people see the difference, it’s going to make a huge difference, and things are going to start to change.

Zack Arnold: Well, the number one takeaway from all of that, and my God, there are a lot of takeaways, but the one that I really want to grab, which I’m sure you’re going to find funny, is that you are a black belt in kung fu, and you are a fourth degree black belt in Brazilian jiu jitsu, which, in my mind, is one of the most complicated martial arts, and just about anybody in the, like, make karate world now can get a black belt in two or three years just by paying for it and showing up. You cannot do that in Brazilian jiu jitsu. You have a fourth degree black belt, and you said, and I quote, sitting on the couch hurt me, caused me pain. So, you, who is essentially bulletproof as a martial artist, you are getting debilitating pain from a couch and a lazy boy.

Ryan Fiorenzi: Yeah, the

Zack Arnold: Takeaway from that is that these are not minor things. When people are like, oh yeah, why I sit all day long, but why I go to the gym, I’ll be on the treadmill for 30 or 45 minutes a night. None of that is undoing the effects that you’re doing to your body, to your circulatory system, and to your brain, because you’re contorted in these positions all day long. So, nobody is immune to the pain and the issues that come with this, no matter how active you are, and you’re about as active as they come, because your entire lifestyle and livelihood depends on you being active, upright, strong, and mobile.

Ryan Fiorenzi: Yeah, well, on that note, one thing that I actually did do right is I have a really good Tempur-Pedic bed, but I know some people don’t realize that their bed is causing them a lot of pain. If your mattress is old, or if there’s no support, you can be doing a lot of damage to your back, so you might think that it’s the workouts that you’re doing, or something, your lifestyle, it could be your bed. So, I recommend making sure that you know if you want to kind of a guide for looking at anything you’re doing in your lifestyle. How’s your posture when you’re doing something? So, if you’re laying in bed and your spine has been. And look at your bed for me, I have a really good bed, but one thing I found years ago is if I lay in my stomach, if I sleep in my stomach, I woke up with severe back pain, and I talked to my chiropractor about, and he said, “Yeah, you absolutely do not want to sleep on your stomach. He said, “Some people can get away with it, but your spine is so bent, and someone in your situation, you definitely don’t want to do it. He recommended that I actually sleep with a pillow between my knees. It’s going to give a little bit more support, so when I’m sleeping on my side, and if I’m sleeping on my back, he told me to put a pillow underneath my knees. And I don’t know if you get massages or for people that get massages, usually when you lay down the table, they’re going to put a pillow underneath your knee, and there’s a reason for doing that. So, how you’re sleeping, something you wouldn’t even think about, can make a huge difference. You could get everything right, and if you get this one thing wrong, you’re spending 789 hours a night sleeping, and you could be causing yourself a lot of pain. So, I think it’s something for people to look at.

Zack Arnold: I mean, the parallels just continue to get crazier and crazier, because that’s exactly the journey that I’ve gone through in the last year. When I found the chiropractor I’m working with now, Dr. Sadie Sanders, who’s also the woman I’m working with, that and we’ve developed this entire video library of all these stretches and everything that’s part of the Move Yourself program. I’ve been to other chiropractors, and, like you said, 60% are, they’re all right, and I was going to one of those where it’s like, all right, well, you know, take your five minutes and you get on these, okay? Let’s adjust your neck and go sit on that machine, all right. Great. So, go to the checkout. It was basically, it was an assembly line of adjustments, and there was no real personal sense of, well, let’s really look at your biomechanics, let’s get a sense of the way your body works. So, I was like, all right, it was kind of making a difference, but it was one of those, you need to go twice a week for the rest of your life, and I’m thinking this, this is why people don’t like chiropractors. And then I found Dr. Sadie Sanders, and I have.. I’ll put a link in the show notes to the previous podcast that I did with her, and I’m gonna have an upcoming one as well. But one of the first things that she and her partner, Dr. Kobe, said was, “Oh, how are you sleeping? I’m like, “Yeah, but.. but we’re talking about my back, like I’m assuming this is because I’m working too much, or you know, whatever it is I’m doing.. like, all right, just slow down, tell me how you sleep. So, I showed them my three most common sleeping positions, and they cringe. They’re like, “Oh, yeah, we need to do something about that. So, the first one was that I was sleeping on my stomach, and now what happens if I involuntarily sleep or find myself sleeping on my stomach? I wake up with horrible neck pain, but that’s what they did. They said, “You need, and I was sleeping with the pillow between my knees. I discovered that helped a lot with my hip tightness, because I have really immobile tight hips, so that was a big help with the lower back tightness in the hips. But putting the pillow under the knees when you’re on your back was huge. But the other thing that they recommended, outside of never sleeping on my stomach again, was I got what’s called – I might get the name wrong now, but I’ll put a link to this product in the show notes. It’s called something like a cervical pillow that you know that basically has the middle taken out of it. It’s a firm pillow, but it almost kind of looks like a donut, and it allows you to stretch out your cervical vertebrae, so you’re not constantly pushing your neck forwards, which is to think about is the laying down version of checking your text messages, if you have too many pillows and they’re too firm, your neck is too far forwards, and the cervical pillow allows your neck to open up with a natural curvature. And as soon as I got that, I was like, oh my god, this is night and day, and the first two or three nights were miserable, because I was not used to being in these positions, and I couldn’t sleep, and they said they’re like, “Listen, this is going to be an adjustment, you’re going to get really awful sleep for a few nights, and I did, but now the way that I feel when I wake up, I don’t have any of the immobility issues, and I’m actually sleeping better just because I’ve changed my position and incorporated pillows in different places.

Ryan Fiorenzi: That’s awesome. I checked out pillows for myself, because my wife, she actually sleeps with an airline pillow, like a travel pill, you put her on your neck,

Zack Arnold: Right,

Ryan Fiorenzi: And she’s, she always gets a lot of pain. I’m always giving her massages on her neck and her shoulder. She’s always gotten that knots in her neck and her back. She absolutely loved it. For me, I don’t have so many issues up in my neck, so it didn’t make a difference for me. But I’d recommend, you know, with this whole life hacking thing, if I saw a product, I thought, well, it’s worth a try. I can always buy it, and I can return it, and see how, see how I respond to it. So, I went through lots of different products, and I highly recommend, if people are having, especially if they’re having upper back and neck issues, to try out one of the cervical pillows, because those could absolutely change your life.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, those are great, and I think that even if you don’t want to invest the time or the money in experimenting or life hacking, you most likely have regular pillows. Just try putting one between your knees, see if that helps. If you’re a side sleeper, and try to find.. and it’s obviously when you’re sleeping, you’re not totally conscious, so sometimes you just wake up and you’re like, “Oh man, I’m sleeping on my stomach again. Yeah, so sometimes that just happens, but you can contort your pillows in such a way to make it harder to do so, and it can really make a difference, and that’s free. That’s what I started doing. I got a really hell, heavy, thick – it’s like a thing, it’s like a bag of sand pillow, it’s one of the Tempur-Pedic pills. I put it behind my back, so I literally can’t twist and go onto my, or I put it on my stomach, so I can’t go into my stomach, because it keeps me from flipping over. So that really helped me out a lot. Well. Go a little bit deeper, then into some of the other things that you have learned and found in all the research that you’ve done in the whole idea of standing, because you’ve already said some of the things that I wanted to hit upon, which is that standing to me is not the answer. When somebody says, “Well, I’m at a standing desk now, I’m like, “Well, that’s great, that’s the first step, but you’re not done, and you clearly are on the same page, where just standing all day long is really no better for you than just sitting all day long. The problem is being sedentary, which is what you had said. So, let’s go a little bit deeper into some of this research, because this is kind of the crux of my entire Move Yourself program. It’s an online learning course, plus a full video library, and this is the entire foundation of it, and knowing that somebody else has discovered all this as well is really encouraging to me. So, what are some of these other things that you’ve learned and found out?

Ryan Fiorenzi: Well, you know, I like to talk about my personal experience, because we have a lot of the research on the website, and I haven’t written everything about all my experiences, but when I started standing, I was really apprehensive, because I’m looking at standing desks, and you know, if you’re looking at a high-end standing desk, I mean, there’s the focal locus, which is amazing, it’s like three grand or $2,500 and there’s a whole range of prices, you can get them for $400 there’s lots of different options, but in the beginning I was like, you know, I spent a lot of money on my back and on my health, and I want to be responsible, and so the first time I start standing, I actually, I have a kitchen table that I work on right now. It’s a good height for sitting for me, but when I stood up, my laptop was kind of like hip level, so that I’m looking down at the laptop, and what happens when your head tilts forward, your head weighs a lot. I mean, it weighs at least 10 pounds, and if you’re tilting your head forward a little bit, the muscles of your upper back, they’re kind of essentially lifting a weight because they’re having to hold your head up because you’re tilting it forward. So, really important is to get to your monitor eye level. So, I thought about buying a new monitor and having two monitors, but the easiest fix was actually I went on Amazon and bought a, I can’t remember what it’s called, but it’s basically like a little, it’s like in the shape of a Z. It’s got a little platform on it, you can put your laptop on it. So I use my laptop as my screen, and then the cheat fix that I started with is I actually connected a USB keyboard. So the keyboard was at my hips, the laptop was eye level, so that way I’m looking for it, because you’re supposed to be looking forward, so you’re not putting that tension on your on your neck and your upper back, and if your keyboard is at hip level, then your elbows are close to your body, because what happens, some people say, “Okay, I’m going to start standing, so they either leave the screen down low, so they’re looking down, they’re going to aggravate their neck and their upper back, or they bring their screen up high, and if they’re working on a laptop, they’re reaching up for their laptops, their elbows are so far away from their body, that’s going to create a lot of tension in your lats and your middle and upper back. So, it’s important that if you’re going to stand, you want to do it right. So, that was really a cheap fix. I think I spent 40 bucks on buying this thing that’ll hold the laptop up. I already had a keyboard, you know, those are probably 1015, bucks, maybe 20 bucks, and I was pretty much ready to go from there. So it doesn’t look beautiful, you know. My wife initially, she’s like, “Oh, you got this thing sitting on the table, it looks a lot nicer, you know, if you have a proper standing desk, but just for getting started to see if it works for you. All you’re doing is basically, when you’re sitting, you’re working on your laptop or your keyboard, when you stand, you just pick up the laptop and you put it on top of the unit that’s going to hold it up, so basically just takes a second to switch it up, switch it down, back and forth, and then if it’s working for you, then you can start looking at using an actual standing desk, so and there are different options for standing desk, you know, if you already have a table that you really like, there’s like Veridesk has a lot of options where you can get a unit that you actually just put on top of your desk, so you don’t need to buy a new desk. This just sits on top, and there’s usually like a little hydraulic, like a lever, you just squeeze it, and you can slide everything up until the level where you can, you know, your eyes are looking straight forward, and you can type at hip level, you can get going from there. The other thing I wanted to mention was floor mats. It doesn’t bother me to not use a floor mat, but when I do use a floor mat, I tend to be a little bit less fatigued, it’s a little bit more comfortable, and if you know, like for myself, needing orthotics, it’s better to stand with the orthotics in, so if people are using orthotics and you’re standing all day and your back’s bothering you, you should use your orthotics while you stand. For women that wear high heels, I don’t think it’s a great idea to stand in high heels. I’ve ran that question by a few massage therapists, and they just start making faces and saying bad things, like, oh no, high heat, no, no. One of my massage therapists said that people shouldn’t be wearing those ever, they, you know, they look pretty, but she said, what it’s doing to your Achilles tendon and your calves and your posture, it’s really your feet are really important. People don’t realize how important your feet are. When you take your foot and you slam it into this really confined shoe, your foot’s on an angle. It’s just, it’s just really not a good situation. So, for women that wear high heels a lot, you might want to keep a pair of comfortable shoes at your desk, so maybe you walk to work in the high heel. Heels, and then once you’re there, you can use a comfortable pair of shoes. From there is one suggestion.

Zack Arnold: Well, the good news is I know that anybody that’s listening to this show probably doesn’t wear high heels, because we all wear jeans and T-shirts to work. But yes, I will second all of that. If you wear heels, they’re great for your dating life, but that’s about it. They’re doing no good for your body whatsoever, and they’re so detrimental, and it’s not a maybe. It is absolutely definite that from a biomechanical perspective, they’re destroying your alignment, your posture. They’re they’re going to cause all kinds of long-term issues. But going back a second to this idea of kind of, you know, building a hack standing desk, I am now thoroughly convinced that you just have all the logins and passwords to all of my work. It is the thing you just talked, and I swear to God, everybody listening, Ryan and I did not prepare this at all. We didn’t talk about any of it. One of the products that I recommend in the Move Yourself program is that $30 platform you get from Amazon that looks like a Z. I’ve done a video demonstration of how to set that up to create your first hack standing workstation, and one of the first things I recommend to people is don’t spend $1,000 until you’ve tried it, and you can build a really sturdy, nice standing desk for about $20 And I do a full video demonstration from top to bottom through all of the assembly. Here’s how to do it in under six minutes for $20 or less, and try it out for a week. And it actually looks pretty good. It’s not a permanent solution, but don’t think to yourself, I’ve been sitting my whole life. I want to be standing now, so I’m going to invest. Like, you don’t need to do that anymore. I made that mistake eight or nine years ago when I started. I never stood, and I was like, well, I want a height-adjustable standing workstation. You can get those for 400 bucks now. Mine was $3,000 when I decided to do that nine years ago, because there was no such thing, they were only made for industrial applications. I’m like, this is that big of an investment and that important to me. So I invested in it, and had I just gotten a standing workstation, I would have been miserable, but because it was height adjustable, I could work my way up to it. But there’s no longer a barrier of entry to trying this, because you can do it for super cheap in just a matter of minutes, so I invite anybody to at least try it, as long as there’s a very clear understanding that you shouldn’t be doing it all day long, and no different than trying to run a marathon. You don’t just run out your door your first morning and go run 26 miles, you have to work up to it, and standing is no different.

Ryan Fiorenzi: I think that’s a really good point. I think giving yourself time to kind of adapt to standing, so the first time you stand, you might do it for two minutes, but the fact that you just got up, you’re actually kind of restarting your system, your metabolism is going to rise up, it kind of wakes your body back up, because when you sedentary for long periods of time, your body starts to shut down in a lot of ways, and that’s where all the problems come from, so even if you’re just standing for just two minutes, and then eventually you start standing for five minutes, eventually standing for 10, and you just listen to your body, give yourself time, and it’s gonna, it’s gonna make a huge difference. You’ll start feeling the difference, you know. For people that listen to Tony Robbins, he talks a lot about the pain pleasure principle, and if in your brain you’re going, oh, standing, it’s hard, it’s work, it’s you’ve already defeated yourself, so if you want to make a change in your life, a good way to think about it is the standing is going to might help me lose a little bit of weight, but I’m going to feel better, I’m going to have more energy, my back could be better. Whatever your goals are, you think about the positive things you’re going to get from standing more and being less sedentary, and you think about the negative things that you probably already have from sitting all the time, whether it’s you put on weight, your energy levels are low, you just don’t feel good, you may have back problems. You have to kind of use the carrot and the stick on yourself every time you think about standing or some positive change in your life. Think about the good things you’re going to have, you know. I think the example he gave was when he was a kid, I don’t know if it was beer or cigarettes that he tried smoking, and his mom said, “Okay, you’re going to smoke this whole pack, and she made him smoke the whole pack, or it was beer, and drink a lot, and he just got super sick. He said, “Now it’s even the.. I don’t know if it was cigarettes or beer, but the smell of that thing, just because of his one experience, was so negative. She trained him never to want that stuff again. So I think we have to use a little strategy in ourselves to get ourselves to stand and get ourselves to experience the benefits, because once you experience the benefits, then you’re like, oh my god, I feel better, this works. Then you start telling other people, and then you know, then then you bought in completely once you start proselytizing for standing, or for whatever change that you, you’ve experienced.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and I think the main key word for me that I tell everybody, and this is the one where I kind of see the light bulb turn on in their eyes, is when I use the word creativity, because with a lot of people, especially information workers, knowledge workers, people in highly creative industries like mine, they don’t really care about body image, and I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, but they just don’t care, like the vast majority of people in my industry are overweight. I mean, that’s just a fact of life, and it’s part of the reason that I wanted to introduce this program. But when you say to them, well, here’s this Beachbody exercise program, and here’s this diet, and you can lose weight, and blah blah blah, and they’re like, I don’t care, like I just want to do my work. I’m not really into body image, I’m all about just doing the best work that I can, and. And then I realized, well, this isn’t about body image, this is about sparking creative energy and building more mental stamina. This isn’t the byproducts of doing all these things are that you’re just going to happen to lose weight, have more energy, feel better, and look better, but that’s that doesn’t need to be the focus. If you’re looking at the pain pleasure principle, the focus is, wait a second, I’m going to be way more creative. I’m going to be able to do better work, which is thus in turn going to help further my career, further my relationships with directors, with producers, with all the people that are going to get me more of these jobs, and I’m going to be able to focus like a machine, because there’s nothing that’s going to increase your productivity more than moving throughout the day.

Ryan Fiorenzi: Absolutely, yeah, amen, could have said it better.

Zack Arnold: So, that having been said, I want to be respectful of your time. So, before we go, I always have a question that I like to ask, and a lot of times I’ll end up getting this question answered just throughout the interview anyway. But if you wanted to give somebody their first action steps, like they come to you and they say either if it’s martial arts related, if it’s back pain related, if it’s standing desk related, and they say, just tell me where to start. Give me the first thing I need to do. There’s so much information, I’m so lost in all this. Just, what do I need to do first?

Ryan Fiorenzi: I would actually go to your site and look at the video for setting up a standing desk on your own for less than 50 bucks, and just get the ball rolling like that, and just see how you feel, see how your productivity is, and you know, make a commitment to yourself, you’re going to do it for the next few weeks or the next month, and just see what happens, if you go online, you know, for a long time the research was sitting all day, is is very bad for you, and now some people, maybe just for link bait, would post articles. No, standing is bad for you, varicose veins, blah blah. Get the ball rolling, experience it for yourself, and then you can find kind of a middle point that works for you, whether you’re standing, you know, 30% of your day or 80% of your day. But at least if you get started now, you’re working with your own experience, it’s not some articles that you read, and a bunch of ideas in your head, you know, in all the different things that I’ve been involved in in my life, like for a little while I did, I was investigating real estate investing, and I went to one course, and the guy said, “You know, I have people that have bought every single major course in real estate investing, and they’ve never bought a house, and then I get someone that does one course, and they went out, and they bought a house, and they might have lost money, but they learned something, and they just.. you just have to start moving. You got to get going, because people get this analysis paralysis, like, “Oh, I’m going to think about it. Well, what happens when you think about it? You’re so busy, you’re probably not going to do anything, because you’re thinking about it. So, make a decision, think about it, make a decision, move forward, and then see how you feel, and then go from there. But I think it’s really important, as busy as people are, especially people in your industry, you don’t have time to think, because something else is going to pop into your head. You got to go pick up the kids, you got this project to do, and it just falls by the wayside. And you know, I get it all the time in my martial arts school, people come and they say, yeah, you know, I, I did an interview with you five years ago, and you know, I told you I was going to go home and think about it, and I never started training. Well, since then I put on 40 pounds, and I feel terrible, and you know that was how many years ago I would have been training all this time. I’d probably feel better. I’m like, yeah, so I think sometimes you just have to grab the bullet by the horns and make a decision and just just move forward.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, I could not have said that better myself, and I love this idea of somebody saying, well, I came to you five years ago, and now I’m thinking, oh my goodness, I’m now here talking to you again. I could have been training for five years. That’s what I always try to tell people, like the best time to have started taking care of your health was yesterday. You should have started yesterday, but you know what, the next best option is today, like if you, if you had a time machine, and you could go back to yourself, say five years ago, be like, dude, five years later you gained all this weight, all you had to do is this one little thing that would have led to another change, it wouldn’t have led to another change, and then another one, trust me, it’s five years later, do this for the love of God, now, now, just imagine you’re standing here right now in the present moment, and that person five years from now has just come to you and said that, and you’re thinking, you know what, maybe I do need to just take that first step, because analysis paralysis is rampant, especially in creative industries, and in the world of editing, you hear this all the time from editors, like, well, I just, I’m not ready to submit the cut, I need to perfect this, I need to perfect that, like, I’m not ready to show it to people, and my feeling is always the opposite. The sooner that you get this in front of other people, the sooner you get feedback, and the sooner you can start to iterate. And that was the way that I looked at this program when this came out two years ago. This program was a mess. I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t, I knew very little of the research, but I said, this is an idea that I have. Let’s see if there’s a market for it. Let’s see if this is really going to inspire people, and it did. And then once I had that validation, I was thinking, all right, now I actually have to figure out how to do this. And that’s been the last two years of my life, is figuring out how to do it, getting a standing desk, or just deciding to be more mobile throughout the day, it can be. Giant undertaking, but if you just decide to take one simple first step, then the ball starts rolling, because people will think, oh well, first I have to research all the standing desks, and I want to see which one is a really good deal. Okay, I found that, but you know what, now I need to get a mat, because if I have the standing desk, I’m gonna need to get the anti-fatigue mat. There’s like 12 different.. I’ll look at that this weekend, but but then if I do that, if I’m gonna be standing all day, I should probably be eating better, so I’m really gonna have to kind of re-examine my diet, and I’m gonna have to look at my diet, but, but I know that sleep is really gonna help me be, I give up, I swear, I’m done, like this is just too much, like just, just do one thing, try that, and build off of it,

Ryan Fiorenzi: That’s a really, really good point, I love that you said that, I, one of the personal development seminars I went to, the guy said, get it good, put it out there. Now you’re committed, you put something out there, you’re gonna later, you’re gonna go back and you’re gonna start working out, you’re gonna get, you’re gonna start fixing it. So I think that’s a really good point. People do feel like they have to take on too much, you know. It’s really common when people.. I’m really big into diet, I have been for years, and I’ve seen a lot of, lot of benefits to it, and I’ve seen people that say, all right, that’s it. I’m going to lose weight. I’m going to stop eating sugar. I’m going to reduce my carbs. I’m going to start eating five times a day. And they have a list of 50 things they’re going to do. I’m going to reduce my calories. They put so much pressure on themselves that they can do it for a few days a week. After a while, the pain is just too much. They can’t take it, and then they binge, and they end up putting on more weight because they put too much pressure on themselves. I think it’s a lot easier, you know, if we’re just talking about losing weight, for example. I’m gonna stop drinking pop. I’m not doing 50 things. All I’m doing is I’m stop drinking pop, and I’m gonna replace that drinking pop with a good habit, like I’m gonna drink 100% fruit juice, or I’m gonna drink water with lemonade, which would be even better. So, I think what you said is perfect. Just make one change, get the ball rolling. You might make a mistake here and there. Maybe, if you’re standing, there’s one day you didn’t do it all day. You’re really involved in a project you forgot, because you have the habit of sitting all day. It’s okay, it’s just one thing. Make a little mistake, you get back on the horse, and you keep doing it. Once you get some momentum, you have a habit of standing. Then we say, okay, now let’s look into the standing desk, man, because I’ve heard that they’re good. Let’s do a little research, make a decision, or whatever the next step is. But I think it’s really important, because people have kind of a perfectionist mentality, like, if I’m going to do this, I’m going to do this right, I’m going to get it right. And it’s, I think it’s a way that people self-sabotage, they stop themselves from making changes because they don’t want to change, because change can be difficult. By saying, well, I’ve got to do this 100% right, otherwise I’m not going to do it. You know, I’d rather start with 10% right and just keep improving and iterating from there.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, exactly. So, I’m going to go into the quick shameless plug portion of the interview. First one being, we’ve talked about floor mats for standing desks several times, and I have not mentioned yet. You got to get a topo mat. There’s.. I don’t know if you are familiar with the topo mat. It is a game changer. They’re

Ryan Fiorenzi: The best.

Zack Arnold: They’re fantastic. So, I don’t think you need to do any shopping. I’ve done years and years of shopping. I have thrown away a lot of anti-fatigue mats, a lot. The topo mat solves the problem. So, just go to fitness and post calm slash topo. Done. Secondly, totally shameless plug is I have enrollment open right now for the Move Yourself program, which is built specifically to give you that one first small step, and then the entire roadmap from there, so you don’t have to do any of the research whatsoever. You just join the course, and I hold your hand through the entire process, and I eliminate analysis paralysis, because I’ve done this for a decade, and I said I want to make this way, way easier for people. That’s what the entire course does, is hand you every single little action step along the way. So all you have to do is show up, play the video, and you’re done. And then the last shameless plug is for you, which is to tell everybody to check out your website. So tell everybody your website one more time, and if they want to contact you directly, how they can do so.

Ryan Fiorenzi: It’s Start standing.org You can actually contact me via the website. We’ve got a lot of information about why standing, why not being sedentary, is important to make that change, and we’re actually starting to develop a little bit more giving people options for ways that they can stand and product reviews, and because we’re starting to get a lot more interest in it. Okay, you’ve sold me on standing. Well, how do I stand? So now we’re starting to develop more of that into the of the website.

Zack Arnold: Well, it has been an absolute pleasure catching up with you once again, and I guarantee that you’re gonna, you’re definitely gonna hear from me again. So, thank you for being on the show.

Ryan Fiorenzi: It sounds great, Zack. It was great to connect with you again, and thanks for all the work that you’re doing. You have a really good program that you put together, and I just want to encourage people. Sometimes people, they, because of maybe money, they say, I don’t want to spend the money, or I don’t want to spend the time. You can actually, like we talked about before, you start making these changes, you can become more productive. You can, in the end, because you’re more productive, you can make more money because you invested in yourself. I think it’s the most important investment you can make is in yourself. So, committing to doing a program like yours is, is the first step that could, it could absolutely change your life, could make you more money, could make you feel better, it could change your relationships, you know, your relationship with your husband, your wife, your kids, if you’re in. Better mood, you have more energy, you’re more productive, you’re kinder to them, you have, you have, you’re giving them better energy, they reflect that good energy back to you. So, I’m a huge believer, best investment you can make is in yourself. So, it’s really important, just, just to get moving, to get started.

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.