Energy is the New Currency

Philip Pape 0:01

If you're a go-getter , high performer , and you're grinding yourself into the ground , chasing success while your energy tanks and your physique suffers . Listen up . My guest today reveals why the most successful people treat energy like currency , and how you can achieve and stay healthy , even shredded year-round , while working not more , but more efficiently . You'll discover why trying to do more with your training is holding you back some surprising mental models to make fat loss easier , and why doubling your protein on pizza might be the smartest nutrition hack you've never tried . You don't have to trade your health , energy or physique to be successful in your business or career . You can have both , and today you're going to learn how to make it happen without burning out . And today you're going to learn how to make it happen without burning out . Welcome to Wits and Weights , the show that helps you build a strong , healthy physique using evidence , engineering and efficiency .

Philip Pape 0:56

I'm your host , philip Pape , and today we're digging into the realities of being a high performer without letting your health suffer . We're going to discuss the concept of treating energy as your most valuable asset if you want to transform both your physique and your success . My guest today is Alex Feinberg , a former professional baseball player , hedge fund analyst and Google executive who now coaches high-performing men on what he calls insane efficiency . We love efficiency on this show , so I'm excited to talk to him today . Alex has developed a unique philosophy , and it's based on psychology , behavioral economics and lots of other concepts that come together to help high performers achieve better results with less work , to stay lean while eating foods they love , and to build sustainable success without flaming out . Today , you're going to learn why intensity might trump volume in training , how to identify the highest leverage actions that make everything else easier , and why Alex believes energy is literally the new money . Alex , welcome to the show .

Alex Feinberg 1:56

Thank you very much for having me , Philip .

Philip Pape 1:59

So you've said that making money with energy is easier than making money with energy . What do you mean by that ?

Alex Feinberg 2:05

Well , what I said is making money with energy is easier than making energy with money . And to put that more precisely , say there's a billionaire and you tell that billionaire , would you give up half of your net worth to double your energy ? Or would you give up half of your energy to double your net worth ? Which would you even bet on personally ? A person with a ton of energy with a $500 million net worth or a person with almost no energy and a $2 billion net worth ? Who do you think is going to be ahead five or 10 years from now ?

Alex Feinberg 2:35

Energy can be converted into money . If you wake up and you're in shape and you've slept seven hours and you have a couple wins under your belt from the previous weeks or months , you're unstoppable . And just think in your life , how many wins have you had when you felt unstoppable versus how many wins have you had when you woke up ? You feel terrible . Your body isn't giving you the right signals . It's hard for you to work an eight hour day , let alone 10 or 12 . Which person do you want to be and which person do you think is better suited to succeed in a highly competitive world ? The guy with energy is going to win over the long run , and so the person who's optimizing for energy is going to end up with more money than the person who's optimizing for money over energy .

Philip Pape 3:19

Yeah , that makes total sense . First of all , did I say it backward Because when you said it , I looked at my notes and it was exactly what was written there , so I must have just flipped it out of my mouth . That's pretty cool . So , yeah , that makes a lot of sense , not even conventional wisdom , but just intuition and my own experience , having not focused on health much of my life and chased my career and getting more tired and worn down with age . Just the idea that fitness , health , strength , all the aspects of energy that I think we're going to talk about today are leverage points , right , they allow you to do more , they allow you to accelerate everything else . And there's a client I can think of who is very much focused on his fitness , but his brother is very much focused on his wealth and his brother is far out of shape and always out of energy and not able to work the hours . And it makes a lot of sense .

Philip Pape 4:08

But I want to get into a little more , because you've worked in finance , you've worked in tech , athletics . I love the combination of , probably , numbers tracking , optimization , all that fun stuff , but we can go overboard on some of that . I know we can , and we can talk about it . Um , you talk about people optimizing for the wrong thing . So let's get into this a little bit . You know , when people are way off base , like what's when it comes to this stuff , what's happening ?

Alex Feinberg 4:30

Well , especially financially successful people . You know , most people will judge their self-worth based on the thing that they assume themselves to be good at , and so smart people will judge their self-worth based on their intelligence relative to other people . Good looking people will judge their self-worth based on how good they look relative to other people , and people who make a lot of money will judge their self-worth frequently based on how much money they have relative to other people . And if you're in the latter bucket , very commonly you can look at your bank statements , look at your brokerage statements and mistakenly think that if the number has gone down , I am worth less than when the number goes up , and what that means is on a short-term basis , you're more likely to go through a proper probably disorganized checklist of all the things you need to do to get your cashflow up that month without necessarily paying attention to how it's making your body feel or the long-term health implications of your decisions . But if you think about what your life would look like if you continue to make the trade-offs that you're making , not just for the next year , but the next five years , 10 years , 20 years , 30 years very often you might find yourself in a position with more money than you can spend and you're going to run out of money before you run out of time .

Alex Feinberg 5:37

And so , realistically , if you want to attack life in the most intelligent way possible , you need to understand where you are most resource constrained . And you are most resource constrained if you're already wealthy around energy and around number of quality of years left . And so I know people . I've worked with people who have FU level money eight plus figures of liquid net worth post-tax and they're concerned about getting an extra $20,000 , $30,000 in free cash flow the next month when they're a couple dozen pounds overweight . And it's like dude , you are at a high predisposition to have a life-ending event earlier than you want to , and you're optimizing for a dollar amount that is going to be basically inconsequential for you in the long term . What matters is the amount of quality years that you have left on this planet , and if you have an eight-figure net worth , chances are prioritizing your health above all else is going to maximize those numbers rather than maximizing the number of dollars that you see in your brokerage statement .

Philip Pape 6:37

So what I'm hearing is that if you're massively wealthy and not focusing on your health , it's going to still hurt your further accumulation of wealth , and if you're not wealthy , not focusing on your health prevents you from accumulating . In other words , reinforcing kind of the main message here about the importance of your health and the energy behind all of this . You talked about a disorganized checklist . Tell us more about what that means for people .

Alex Feinberg 6:58

Most people will wake up and they have a million things to do and they only have 15 hours to get them done , 12 hours to get them done , 16 hours to get them done . If they're working all day , and very frequently people will focus on the

The Kingpin Approach to Problem Solving

Alex Feinberg 7:11

thing that hurts the most . The fire that's burning the brightest gets the most attention . The wheel that is the squeakiest gets the most attention . Unfortunately , if you approach problem solving like that , you end up spread too thin and you're not solving as many problems as you possibly could solve . So what I tell people to do , and what I try to do myself , is identify a kingpin around which you can knock out one problem that leads to other problems being solved more easily . So a great kingpin is your energy right ? If you sleep seven hours , wake up , get a workout done before 9am , chances are the next 10 hours of your day are going to be twice as productive as if you were up until 2am the night before . You got five or six hours of sleep . You didn't get a workout in . You skipped breakfast . You're running on coffee and adrenaline . You didn't get a workout in . You skipped breakfast . You're running on coffee and adrenaline .

Alex Feinberg 8:10

Like that is not high quality work that you're outputting .

Alex Feinberg 8:12

And sure , there may be times where you have no choice for a one , two , three day sprint , one , two week sprint , I get that . But if that's your everyday approach , you are leaving so much progress on the table because you're just not going to be as creative as you could possibly be by shortchanging yourself on sleep and shortchanging yourself on exercise . Ultimately , in a highly competitive economy , you need to be able to bring ideas , services and products to the table that are differentiated from the competition , which require innovation and require creativity to put to market . If you don't sleep , if you don't have yourself at a high energy , high optimism , high confidence place , you're just not going to be able to bring a competitively differentiated product to market and ultimately , you're going to lose market share , which is the first step to you losing pricing power , which is the first step to you becoming a slave in our capitalist system . You need to have a differentiated point to offer the market and you're not going to have it if you feel like crap all the time .

Philip Pape 9:07

Yeah , all I could imagine is running around putting out fires all day , right ? I see it in my career as well , where the urgent but not important things get the attention right and sometimes it's the I'll say , the easy , simple tasks on your checklist , because now you're busy , you're checking them off . It makes a lot of sense and the kingpin approach is a good way to put it . So you also talked about , in terms of context of energy , how your body feels , or listening to your body , and that term gets thrown around a lot , but I agree that it's a common thread in this space . What do you mean by that and how can someone objectively listen to their body and understand how their body feels right now , when they're in the thick of this kind of lifestyle you're talking about and need to take a step back ?

Alex Feinberg 9:46

Well , it's a lot easier to understand your body if you have a history of playing sports . It's a little bit less easy when you don't , because you become attenuated to feeling like crap . It might be a pleasant surprise , or a shocking surprise , that most people who are healthy don't feel like crap every day . They don't feel tired . In fact , they feel invigorated and excited to get work done that you might find to be anxiety-inducing . Try it . Try two different approaches . One you sleep five hours . One you sleep seven hours . You view the exact same task or exact same person . If you slept seven hours , you view the task that might be daunting as challenging and cool and exciting . You might view a person who , with five hours of sleep , you view exhausting . With seven hours of sleep , you view energizing , exhilarating , and so you are more open to enjoying the challenges of life . When you have more energy and if you're the type of person who can look at a challenging situation and say , no , hey guys , I know this is going to be hard but it's going to be fun , you're going to become the type of leader that other people want to be around .

Alex Feinberg 10:49

So if you don't know how your energy is number one , if you're testing yourself in the gym , testing yourself cardio wise . You're testing yourself weight wise . You know if your output is lagging behind your normal sessions . Now , that might not be because of sleep , it might be because you're dehydrated , it might be because you're not eating enough protein or not eating enough whole foods to get the amount of macro or micronutrients . But if you get yourself on a reasonably consistent gym schedule , you will know if your output is lagging where it normally is , and that is a very strong indicator of your recovery levels and your energy . That is , of course , if you're not tracking it with a whoop or an aura , which I don't , because I prefer using gym metrics to inform me on my recovery rather than artificially or scientifically created recovery metrics that are meant to approximate my ability to perform in the gym . The number one criteria for if you're recovered is if you can physically perform and mentally perform , and so your performance marks are going to be the most accurate measurement of your actual recovery .

Philip Pape 11:50

I'm so glad you said that , because we are definitely all about lifting in an intelligent way that balances the stress versus the recovery and sometimes recovery is the missing piece here and the idea of using a consistent gym schedule , whether it's three , four , five days a week , whatever , and going in and you know pretty much like clockwork how you feel , I mean , to the level of eating the twice-sized banana before your workout affects you this way and affect you this way yesterday , and it's , rather than being a lagging indicator or , like you said , a number which is at best a correlation that may not even be accurate on a wearable , you know you can get more reps or you're maybe not eating enough , not sleeping enough , whatever .

Philip Pape 12:28

Before we get into the gym stuff , because I definitely want to talk about it is it normal for someone to wake up in the morning and have what you described in terms of energy , right , super excited , ready to go face the challenging projects head on , and by one , two o'clockclock that has completely flipped , you know , cause ? This is the normal profile we hear from people is that drop throughout the day , the 3 PM energy crash , the total , I mean , you know , by six , 7 PM at night ? You don't want to do anything . You want to binge Netflix . Is that normal ? Is some level of that Okay , like what ? What are your thoughts on that ?

Alex Feinberg 13:00

Well , by population standards , it is normal , whether it's normal or healthy or necessary or three different uh you know questions or forms of evaluation . I would say a vast majority of adults experience that , but if you're aware of the foods that you put in your body and the pace at which you work and how that makes you feel , uh , you can stave off probably two-thirds of that . I got off of a call with one of my clients a few weeks ago who's just absolutely burned out with his work at his startup , especially coupled with the side business that he runs , and I told him look , you have three options because even if you're managing your energy as efficiently as you possibly can , um , uh , from a sleep standpoint , from a training standpoint , from a diet standpoint , you need to work less . And there's three things that we can have you do . We can have you delegate more , and we've already gone through your schedule and we can reasonably assume that 10% of the things you're doing you can delegate . So it's not like 100% you can just farm out , but most people they can look through their action items and if they have a 12-hour exhausting workday , 10% of that can probably be delegated to other people .

Alex Feinberg 14:06

You can decline other things . And so this is what one of the benefits of being a high performer who's kind of irreplaceable is if he declines work , what is his employer going to do ? It's a little bit different if you run your own company but he's an executive at someone else's company . You can decline work right , where it's going to be a lot easier for them to find somebody else to do the work that he's declining than it is for them to replace him . So he can decline the work , delegate decline or ignore . The third thing is if it's a low priority item , he can just ignore it . You don't have to do everything that you're expected to do . And the specific case for him was there was one piece of a puzzle that impacted forecasts for a small percentage of his company's quarterly revenue , and the reality was the amount of time that it would take him to do this thing right would be insignificant compared to the amount of time it would create to just grow the business by 5% extra . So rather than get the forecast right to a 10th of a percent or a half of a percent , why don't we just figure out how we can grow the business by 5% and say , hey , sorry , I didn't have enough time to do all the other things , and so there's typically ways that we can augment performance while reducing the amount of demands that people feel , and what that will allow them to do is pace themselves a little bit more evenly or intelligently throughout the day .

Alex Feinberg 15:23

Because even if your sleep is on point , even if your training and diet is on point , you could find yourself tired at 3 PM and , by 7 PM , just wanting to go home , have a drink and watch TV . Okay , so that's number one . We need to figure out how you can be more efficient with less time . Number two we need to be more efficient with how we train and how we eat . So morning training will wake you up for the day . Evening training will typically wake you up at night and will make it harder for you to recover and will make it harder for you to have energy the next day . So I much prefer morning training or lunchtime training is early in the day for people who can do it .

Alex Feinberg 15:58

The second thing is try not to overload on carbs at lunch .

Alex Feinberg 16:02

Right , I know that pasta might seem appealing , I know pizza might seem appealing , a huge burrito bowl might seem appealing , but if you're going to overload yourself with carbs at lunch , you're going to get a huge insulin spike after lunch and you're going to want to take a nap . And maybe you work for a Chinese company , like the company I worked for when I was working in the cryptocurrency space , where you can take a nap at your desk for 20 or 30 minutes after lunch . But chances are , if you work in the United States , you don't ,

Training for Results, Not Exhaustion

Alex Feinberg 16:26

and it's not common for you to be taking a post lunch siesta . And so if that's not common for you , then we need to be more intelligent about how many carbs we're consuming and when we're consuming them . So skip the carb bomb in the afternoon and you will not have an insulin bomb in the afternoon . And if you don't have an insulin bomb in the afternoon and if you don't have an insulin bomb in the afternoon , chances are you're not going to have that lethargy that you've been experiencing .

Philip Pape 16:48

Two three , four o'clock and beyond . Yeah , cool . So I'm just taking notes here because I agree with everything you said and some of this has . For some of us , we've learned through the school of hard knocks .

Philip Pape 16:57

right , let's be honest , or we're self-included right or working with clients , because I can think of one client right now who's faced the fear of carbs .

Philip Pape 17:04

He's super lean , high performer , very much afraid to gain weight and afraid to eat carbs . But what you're talking about here is there is an experimentation aspect to this as well . There's data and tracking . We can get into what tracking means , because I've heard you talk about people obsessing over tracking too much for what they get out of it is not worth what the effort it takes to track , kind of like your example with ignoring things or declining things or delegating . So when it comes to carbs , for example , that's just a great , highly effective tip . As well as working out in the morning and I know people make excuses for things and we can talk about maybe how to get around those but when you combine eating a good breakfast , having carbs around your training , having a balanced lunch and then would you agree , having some carbs , that in the evening can be helpful for folks . I know for some it helps with sleep . What are your thoughts on that ?

Alex Feinberg 17:52

I mean I would prefer to be stacking more food earlier in the day and I don't necessarily do this by example Like , if you actually look at my meals I eat , my dinner is my biggest meal and that's not supposed to be the case , because it does affect your sleep quality .

Alex Feinberg 18:03

But yeah , I mean , if carbs at night make it easier for you to sleep , it's because of the insulin that you get after you eat the carbs . The carbs themselves should make it harder for you to sleep , and so the question is are you waking up in the middle of the night , perhaps more than you commonly do after eating like large bowls of pasta for dinner ? And if that's the case , then maybe those carbs are helping you go to sleep , but they're not helping you stay asleep . So be cognizant of that . Pay attention to how you feel after eating certain meals , and if you have outcomes that you want to repeat , perhaps consider repeating those meals , and if you have outcomes that you do not want to repeat , consider not repeating those meals . I know it sounds crazy , but your body will have very predictable responses to things that are good for it and bad for it , so just pay attention .

Philip Pape 18:45

That's the best tip you can give of the whole podcast , and the one that people , I think , ignore the most is they want an answer . They want you to tell them what to do , and I'm like usually the answer is your body will tell you what to do . You've just got to try it . Like it may not work , so try it . The morning training , too , is another one that I just get . I see so much resistance about where you've got these trade-offs you're making . You're like okay , if I train in the morning I have to get up earlier . Does that mean it now cuts into my sleep ? But of course you're pulling it from somewhere else . Assuming you're training consistently already and it's like 4 PM training , how do you shift it to the morning ? What are the biggest roadblocks you see for folks trying to make that move ?

Alex Feinberg 19:22

Here's the deal . Okay , when I worked in corporate America , I got up earlier than everybody else that I worked with , but I was one of the last people in the office and nobody cared . And the reason nobody cared wasn't because I was the top producer , it was because I had the best physique of anybody on the floor and everybody knew that I was up early , working hard . And so if nobody actually cares if you're the first person in the office , people care if you're lazy , and so if you realize that you're not being judged on the things that you think you're being judged on , you're being judged more primally . And if people know that you're up moving weights and sweating in the morning , you have a much wider grace period in most professions than other people .

Alex Feinberg 20:08

Training in the afternoon does not afford you that luxury . So you will not get away with leaving work early , so you can go to the gym as easy as you will get away with showing up to work late because you are at the gym , okay , and so remember , this is not . This does not mathematically even out . There are certain buckets that you can pull from that . Don't just net out If you can do it the same thing later in the day . You need to understand where the cheat codes are , and the cheat code is if you get up an hour earlier , say , it takes you two hours to get to the gym , train , shower , do all that stuff . If you get up an hour earlier than everybody that you work with and you get to work an hour later than everybody you work with , but everybody knows that you were training your butt off , nobody's going to care .

Alex Feinberg 20:51

Okay , so you're actually saving time . Instead of using those same two hours after work to get to the gym to work out , to shower , you're using them before work . It takes half the time . Okay , in addition to it taking half the time , you're going to be probably 10 to 20% more productive during your day for having got that workout done before , and your sleep is probably going to be 10 to 20% better because you're not . You know , you don't have adrenaline running through your veins from , you know , finishing a workout and maybe a pre-workout drink at 5 , 6 , 7 pm .

Alex Feinberg 21:25

So you're not actually investing more time . You're investing substantially less time going to the gym when you do it early in the morning , but it does require that you wake up and go do it , and so look , if you can't wake up to an alarm . I know you can wake up to an early alarm . You've had an early flight , but you've had an alarm go off to and you've not missed the flight most times , so you can get up . It might take a week or two or three weeks of adjustment , but you're going to end up getting hundreds of hours of productivity back by making that switch , and those are the switches that you need to make , the ones that will pay you back in time and energy over the long run .

Alex Feinberg 22:01

You make investments . You make financial investments . You're investing $100,000 in something this year where you could buy a nice Mercedes , or you could put $100,000 into a stock or cryptocurrency or something that you expect to grow over time . Well , the same thing is true with your time and your energy . You can invest a small amount of time and a small amount of energy in the morning and over time , you'll get that time back , you'll get that energy back and ultimately , it will grow and multiply in the long run , the same way a financial investment will .

Philip Pape 22:32

Is this the suspiciously simple logic you talk about a lot Because you made a lot of points that are almost never made related to the efficiency of morning workouts . Right , we could argue for having more energy . That's awesome , but the fact that not training in the morning and trying to train in the afternoon has all these other implications were judged primally . That's a great way to put it judged primally . I see that myself and , having worked in a field with engineers and software folks who roll in at 10 o'clock anyway , it almost doesn't matter , and since COVID now , people working hybrid and everything generally doesn't matter . I'm sure there's specific jobs where you know if you have to clock in . Unfortunately , that's a different situation . No-transcript . Why are the way most people training not working for them and holding them back Even if they do track ?

Alex Feinberg 23:49

their workouts , but they're chasing the wrong thing . It's because most people either don't think about fitness 11 months out of the year and then one month out of the year , they look at themselves in the mirror and they're disgusted by it and they think that they have a penance to pay , and they think that , because they've been gluttonous for the previous 11 months , that the opposite of gluttony is the solution to their problem . Number one or number two they're stuck in intermediate mode . Intermediate mode meaning maybe they were overweight a couple , two , three years ago and the way they got out of being significantly overweight was by never missing a workout , by being consistent , by maybe tracking their macros , and they're so scared to regress from the changes that they made to go from beginner to intermediate that they're incapable of making the changes that are necessary to go from intermediate to advanced . And so , typically , when when you're going from beginner to intermediate , you do need to undergo a little bit more pain , you do need to get a little bit sore , you do need to sweat a little bit more than you were accustomed to , but success isn't linear , and so simply doubling the changes that you made to go from beginner to intermediate does not guarantee that you're going to go from intermediate to advanced .

Alex Feinberg 24:54

In fact , frequently it can lead you to burning out faster or even regressing , and so , unfortunately

Intensity vs. Volume in Training

Alex Feinberg 25:00

, a lot of offerings that are made to people commercially are built around the myths that people have about what they need to do to be fit , namely sweat a lot , get sore or try something really hard . I get so many people say , oh , you should try this workout , you should try CrossFit , it's really hard . Or you should try this workout it's . It makes you super sore . Like , I don't care about those things . What I care about is being able to run faster and lift progressively heavier weights , and if it's hard and doesn't allow me to do that , that is the worst workout I could possibly do , because it is a high investment , low return workout .

Alex Feinberg 25:31

It's going to suck and you're not going to get anything for it , yeah Right , if it's easy and it lets me do those things . That was the best workout that I can possibly do , because it is a low investment , high return workout , and the reason why people should be focused on their output more than their input is because having a high resting metabolic rate will burn far more calories outside the gym than having a high calorie burning workout will burn inside the gym . So in my early 30s , I was in far better shape as a cryptocurrency executive than I was as a professional athlete in my early 20s , and this is not supposed to happen , because my genetics are the same and I wasn't on any performance enhancing drugs and I had a full-time job . But what was different was I was allowing myself to take days off whenever I wanted to take them off , when my body was telling me to take them off . I was able to train exactly the way that I wanted to train , taking as much rest periods in between sets as I wanted to , as well as in between workouts . Like I had mentioned , what that enabled me to do was train at a higher capacity than I had ever trained before , meaning I was running faster , or at least my intervals were faster than they were in my early 20s . The weights I was lifting were heavier than they were in my early 20s because I was doing less of it .

Alex Feinberg 26:39

Okay , so , because I was doing less of it , I was able to get to 4% body fat using hydrostatic testing . Shredded abs , eating three to 4,000 calories every single day of like pizza , burgers , fried chicken and tacos Awesome food . Never in a million years did I ever think I would look like that . That was not my intention when I underwent those workouts . All I wanted to do was perform at a higher level and I couldn't figure out why I was getting in such good shape , considering I was not in that shape in my early 20s , when I was actually getting paid money to play sports .

Alex Feinberg 27:09

Okay , so enter the basal metabolic test right , where I had my my basal metabolic rate tested by body spec , who also does DEXA scans , and I went in and I found out that my body was burning like 3,300 calories estimated on days that I didn't even work out . That was just about a 2,600 calorie resting metabolic rate plus 700 calories like talking to people on podcasts or writing emails or walking to the refrigerator , like not including any exercise . And so , clearly , the way that I was training in the gym was leading me to burn almost a thousand calories more than the average male my age . On days that all I did was sit on the couch , okay .

Alex Feinberg 27:53

So most workouts that you do , the really hard workouts where you sweat a lot and got really sore don't allow you to burn 1000 calories in the gym . Okay . Well , just like , investing in the right cryptocurrencies and investing in the right equities will lead to a far greater financial return than getting a job that pays you a lot of money on a monthly basis , investing in the right exercises will yield a far better resting metabolic rate benefit than will going to the gym and doing a very hard workout that makes you sweat a lot and gets you really sore .

Philip Pape 28:24

Yeah , I 100% agree with that . I think this easy versus hard and the compound interest from your metabolism are highly misunderstood concepts and , like you mentioned , you can only burn so many calories working out and there's lots of issues with that too , because that's not why we work out , we train . It also doesn't hold up when we look at the constrained energy model and how we adapt and all of those things become more efficient , which backfires . When it comes to that , I want to just sit on the easy versus hard spectrum because a while ago , when I was revisiting the language of my podcast description , right , One of the phrases you hear a lot is work smarter , not harder , and I think that's a misphrased .

Philip Pape 29:04

I don't know , you tell me , but like , I always think it's work smarter , not harder , right , but you still have to work . Quote unquote hard Hard is kind of subjective , I guess in some way Do you think it's an inverse curve of like easy versus hard and the output when it comes to training ? Well , almost like there's a profit maximization curve , like right in the middle you have to find like the price versus , you know , demand , or is it more of a ? There's always a hard , it's the type of hard .

Alex Feinberg 29:31

Well , there's that too .

Philip Pape 29:32

It's the type of hard right yeah .

Alex Feinberg 29:33

Your workouts need to be hard , Like you're not going to increase your workout capacity by not going through singular moments of discomfort , right ? So if you want to get better at running intervals which I think has a very strong correlation with your not just VO two max but your resting metabolic rate those are going to be uncomfortable , particularly the last 10 , 20 , 30 seconds of your last two , three , four intervals . They are , there's no two ways about it , but that doesn't mean they should be hard every single day without resting ever , Right ? Uh , your last few reps of a set are going to be hard , but that doesn't mean you need to do 20 of those sets , Okay . So there is a ? Uh , you know , just like you said , there's , there's an efficient frontier of how hard it needs to be , and ideally it needs to be very hard , but there doesn't need to be that much of it .

Alex Feinberg 30:24

And so if you think about a workout that I'll do , you know I'm only doing nine to 15 sets in the gym three days a week for lifting gym , three days a week for lifting . Now , those sets might require multiple warmup sets , but it's nine to 15 working sets plus 13 minutes of cardio most of the time . So I'm doing a 13 minute cardio warm up , Um , and then I'm doing a nine to 13 set lift high intensity . Right , it takes me four minutes of rest to recover from my sets because they're they're at , you know , near peak load .

Philip Pape 30:59

Yeah , let's define intensity . We're meaning we're meaning the training context of intensity as in load , just so people don't think intensity means something else .

Alex Feinberg 31:06

Yeah , so I'm pushing my body and all of my lifts require a tremendous amount of core engagement , a tremendous amount of lute engagement , a tremendous amount of lat engagement , because everything in your core is going to make it easier for you to move weight and so , especially as you become more effective at lifting weights , what it is is . It's a neurological change that your body makes by being able to harness a greater portion of your skeleton . And when you're able to harness a greater portion of your skeleton to move weight , you need to rest longer in between sets , you need to rest longer in between workouts , but that's the only thing that you can do to continue to push your body to get stronger and better and maintain or increase your resting metabolic rate over time , and so you ultimately learn to deal with the discomfort of those last one , two , three reps of you know six , seven , eight sets per workout , and then that's all it is . But if you look at , you know a lot of the commercial classes , whether it's an orange theory or something similar , it's like they're doing , you know , a set every 60 seconds . You're doing 45 sets in a workout . It's like and those are all hard Every rep burns and I guarantee you , my reps , don't burn .

Alex Feinberg 32:16

Yeah , burn is not the , is not the feeling that I feel when I'm close to failure . My sets are hard but they don't burn , and so realize that burning is simply a , a feeling of lactic acid buildup . And unless you're talking about doing , you know , assault bites , bike sprints , which will burn , um , and you will have a lactic acid buildup . If you want to set PRs , doing those , your lifts really shouldn't burn . Um , when you're , when you're nearing mechanical failure , you're going to near mechanical failure .

Philip Pape 32:47

Your body's going to get fatigued , but it's not going to burn , yeah totally agree , and I think there , when people get started on a proper strength training program with all that rest and recovery , what looks like a bare minimum effective dose of sets ? If you looked at just hypertrophy literature , which is not what we're necessarily talking about , right , we're talking about strength and hypertrophy . It depends on your goal . People are always surprised Like I'm not sore , am I actually making progress ? And I think that's where the initial doubt sets in , for a beginner perhaps . And then they need to do with the tracking that you talked about and actually show that no , you're actually getting stronger , you're getting a result here . What's your ideal type of approach for a beginner ? Is it a starting strength style like barbell program ? Yeah , yeah .

Alex Feinberg 33:30

So I mean you don't need to do barbell if you're a beginner , especially if you're a beginner , especially if you're you're into your 30s , 40s or beyond . Dumbbells are are fairly appropriate . I don't have anybody barbell squat , uh , you know if they haven't barbell squatted , uh , it's just not a movement that I think is really great for beginners , requires more balance and mobility than most people have . But if you've done it , you know how to do it . Okay , like we can talk about safer variants of lower , uh less lower , lumbar stress .

Making Healthy Food That Tastes Great

Alex Feinberg 34:01

And then I prefer dumbbell bench press to a barbell bench press . But you know , like three by 10 , three by eight , three by five style workouts are fine for beginners . The difference , uh , I would actually prefer higher reps for beginners because beginners need to practice lifting weights . So , just like shooting free throws or hitting baseballs , you become more efficient at doing things that you have a lot of practice reps doing . And if you're just starting out lifting weights , I think a lot of newbie gains are from people just practicing lifting , and so a lot of the ideas that people have about what they need to do to be more effective as a lifter are what they need to do to be more effective as a beginner lifter . So never miss a workout when you're a beginner because even if you're tired , your body can still use the practice .

Alex Feinberg 34:41

But once you've gotten through those first two or three years , then it requires a little bit of an adjustment where you have to start paying attention to how your body feels . If you pay attention to how your body feels as a beginner , you're never going to go to the gym the second day you're there because the first day it's going to get too sore . But if you don't pay attention to how your body feels and you're 10 years in , blow a disc out , you could , you know you could sublux certain things , you put yourself at injury risk that you don't want to be in . And so oftentimes life is challenging because the lessons that we learned yesterday are not applicable today and the things that allowed us to get to halfway up the mountain are not going to allow us to get all the way up the summit . And we need to be nimble cognitively nimble enough to recognize when the things that worked in the past are not going to work in the future .

Philip Pape 35:23

Yeah , cognitively nimble , that is true . Sometimes I use the image that the person we are is constantly changing , right , even when you're talking about your diet and how you respond to say , a calorie deficit may change from fat loss phase to fat loss phase because the person you are in that moment has a lot of different variables going on in your life and the person you are and your body has changed , etc . You talked earlier about the linear approach works at first for beginners . You can have a lot of frequency , like you can get into the gym frequently and recover fairly quickly and grow fairly quickly . Fairly quickly , would you say that the executives and high performers you work with are mostly in the beginner camp because they've neglected their health and starting off , or a lot of them have really tried to go to the gym and now they're close to that intermediate point .

Alex Feinberg 36:04

A lot of the people that I work with may be technically in the beginner camp because of what they've done over the last six months , but that doesn't mean that they're going to follow a beginner style trajectory , because if you've built up training capacity , even if it was 20 years ago , uh , yes , you may be on a three by 10 style plan for your first six months , but you're going to you're going to get that get those gains back very quickly , um , and if you're consistent with it , you know , probably within a year you know 12 to 18 months you'll be in a better spot than you were , you know , three years into lifting , so you'll get it back .

Alex Feinberg 36:41

It does take patience , um , and you know you will feel like you've regressed a little bit , but you know , number one , you're not trying to get hurt and so you need to challenge your body with the appropriate stimulus . That's challenging , but it doesn't put you at injury risk and so , like , yeah , we're not going to load the barbell with two or three plates on it when you haven't lifted in six , six months . Like , you're gonna have to be a little bit more intelligent with it , but you can scale it faster .

Philip Pape 37:01

A hundred percent . So you also mentioned the journey you went through , uh , related to your leanness and your training , consistency and proper rest and recovery , and how you could eat pizza and tacos and burgers which I love because , like , we're all about a flexible diet that makes sense for you . So break that down for us . Right , like people are hearing that saying , well , I , you know , I'm not going to burn 3,300 calories right , there's the skepticism of how that happens , how you can maintain leanness . Is there variability from person to person ? There is , but how much variability is there ? Those kinds of , I'll say , skeptical , curious questions that will come up around that .

Alex Feinberg 37:38

Well , there's definitely variability person to person , and I will tell you from personal experience there's nothing great about being able to eat 3,300 calories per day . In fact , if I could satisfy my hunger on 2,200 calories per day , that would be easier , it would be cheaper , it would put less stress on my gastrointestinal system . I don't need to eat eight slices of pizza for the sake of eating eight slices of pizza . I would much prefer to be satiated after four slices of pizza . It just so happens that my metabolism is running so fast that it requires eight slices of pizza for me to be full , and so , no matter where your resting metabolic rate is , if you're eating when you're not hungry , you're going to get fat , most likely . But if you're eating protein dominant real food when you're hungry until you are full , there's a very good chance that your caloric intake is matching what your caloric needs are .

Alex Feinberg 38:29

If you're training at a high intensity Okay , so that's the key . If you're training at a high intensity and you're eating protein dominant real food only when you're hungry , stopping when you're full , whether your resting metabolic rate has you burning 3,300 calories on rest days or 2,300 calories on rest days , you can eat pizza , burgers , fried chicken and tacos , you can't necessarily eat them with the same macronutrient proportions that come when you buy them commercially made . So one asterisk is I would be the one making these foods for myself . I would generally be using seed oil-free ingredients , but , more importantly , I would be doubling or tripling the meat compared to what you would get in a commercial substitute , and I would stop eating it when I was full , not stop eating it when the meal was completed .

Alex Feinberg 39:16

Okay . So if you have the discipline to say , hey , you know what , I've had half of a double cheeseburger I'm good for now . I'm going to finish the other half in three hours . When I'm hungry , cool Right . But if you have to eat all the food that's in front of you , then you know , no matter what your threshold is , whether it's 2,200 , 3,200 or 4,200 calories a day you're going to have trouble stopping .

Philip Pape 39:37

Got it ? Yeah , no , really great points . It's funny you mentioned the double the protein , because if you see it in my sandwiches you almost lose the bread , right , because there's so much meat on there . And all those people are like , why don't you just not have the bread ? It's all me , yeah . But uh , yeah , the fact that you have to be training at high intensity as a prerequisite is gold , because I get into arguments all the time with the YouTube haters about when I talk about eating carbs or carnivore maybe isn't serving you if you're training and they're like yeah , but you get fat eating carbs Like yeah , probably if you're not training right , if you're not training at all , let alone at a high intensity .

Philip Pape 40:11

And then the making at home is really important . You mentioned dinner is your biggest meal . It would be my biggest meal if I made most of my dinners . My wife now does . She's become such a great cook that she tends to make these like fairly lean four or 500 calorie dinners . So I've sort of been trained to get my food earlier . But it really works out well because then I kind of can have some flexibility there . Anyway , side tangent , how often do you think people should in their diets incorporate quote-unquote . Real foods , whole foods , nutrient-dense foods versus how much allowance is there in a flexible diet for just utter indulgences ? Hedonistic indulgences , let's call them I don't know .

Alex Feinberg 40:47

I think 90 of the food at least that you eat should be . You can't answer that with a one-size-fits-all answer . Fair point , um , it's like how often should you drink ? Well , if you're an alcoholic , never if you're in .

Alex Feinberg 40:59

Some people are addicted to sugar . I've worked with people that are like I can't just eat a cup of ice cream , I have to eat like a half gallon . I'm like well , that's going to be a problem For me . I can eat a cup of ice cream and so you know I can eat ice . So , ideally , I don't like people eating junk food every day , because when it's an everyday type thing , you tend to do it , whether you crave it or whether you don't crave it . So I much prefer to space consumption around cravings , where you just ask yourself am I craving this or am I not ?

Alex Feinberg 41:36

Because the thing about processed food , the thing about sugar , is , the more you eat , the more you crave .

Alex Feinberg 41:44

Sugar is , the more you eat , the more you crave .

Alex Feinberg 41:45

So if you tell yourself and this is one reason why I don't like caloric based plans is because people are like , oh , I have 200 calories left , I can have this ice cream bar Like , okay , well , you know what that means is , even if you weren't craving that ice cream bar today and you ate it because you had 200 calories left , now tomorrow you have an ice cream craving and you may not have those 200 calories left , and so it's going to be that much harder for you to get through that diet that's based around a number that's not aligned with what your body's telling you , and so you know this is one of the big things that I tell people around the holidays is you're always going to be around sweets .

Alex Feinberg 42:10

It's okay to have them , just make sure you're craving them . You stop eating them when you stop craving them . That , ultimately , is what is going to reduce your cumulative consumption the most , with the exception of people who are addicted to sugar . Those people are a little bit harder to coach because they really can't have any . The way you can't say like oh , I know you're in like the 12 step program so you can just have like one beer every three days . It doesn't work like that Shout out to Philippe .

Max 42:34

I know Philippe for a long time . I know how passionate he is about healthy eating and body strength and that's why I choose him to be my coach . I was no stranger to dieting and body training , but I always struggled to do it sustainably . Philip helped me prioritize my goals with evidence-based

High Performance & Physical Appearance

Max 42:51

recommendations , while not overstressing my body and not feeling like I'm starving . In six months , I lost 45 pounds without drastically changing the foods I enjoy , but now I have a more balanced diet . I weight train consistently but , most importantly , I do it sustainably . If a scientifically sound , healthy diet and a lean , strong body is what you're looking for , a free lead pay is your guy .

Philip Pape 43:17

For sure . There's definitely those cases where something in the house is going to be a problem , no matter what , even if it's hidden away , and we have to pull out a different tool for that , like utter avoidance , like you mentioned . So you mentioned satiety and hunger signals a few times , including the craving , and I know some people are thinking well , how do I tap into that ? How do I train myself to do that ? Like there must be a habit formation period . What's your process for going from what most people eat , which is like 70% processed , ultra processed foods in America Like that is the number , it's insane to what you're talking about , which is 90% eating for your hunger , eating for your training goals ? What's your process ?

Alex Feinberg 43:52

It's not hard to make burgers and pizza and tacos at home , like , it's just not right . So you can buy a bunch of of ground beef and you can grill it all , especially now it's the summer . You can grill five pounds of ground beef on the one Sunday and you can probably do it in 45 minutes , okay . So five pounds of ground beef , that's going to feed a family of four for a day , or you , yeah . Or one meat for a day , right . But like you , or and you can you can prep 12 pounds of ground beef Like a grill can hold a lot of meat , and so you need to realize that you can do it . You just need to start prepping food in bulk , and so ground beef is one of those foods that you can prep in bulk . You can buy pizzas , where there's nothing prohibiting you from buying pizza and then buying chicken and then slicing the chicken up and throwing the pizza in the oven and adding your own chicken to the pizza .

Max 44:43

Pretty easy actually . And throwing the pizza in the oven and adding your own chicken to the pizza Pretty easy actually . Yeah , right , so it's like it's not hard .

Alex Feinberg 44:47

The reason why you don't do it is because it's anxiety-inducing and it seems more challenging than pressing a couple buttons on your DoorDash app or going through a drive-through . But if you actually think about the challenge , it's not hard to buy chicken , slice it up and put the thing in the oven . It takes almost the same amount of time as like pressing a couple of buttons on DoorDash and waiting for the food to come to your door . So there's very simple adjustments that people can make to turn their food from something that's like highly processed to something that's like generally acceptable . They just need to get accustomed to change , and change is the hardest thing because change itself is anxiety inducing and we're wired to want to continue the habits that we've established over the last decade of our life . Um , no matter how urgently we need to change them , no matter what the upside or that change is , we want to stick to what makes us feel comfortable . Unfortunately , that's going to keep us in the same place or worse than where we are today .

Philip Pape 45:39

Yeah , change a hundred percent . It's a roots in that necessity . So you met . I like your approach of right . We don't . We don't like restriction . We don't want to cut and avoid just just as our entry point , but instead make the things ourselves at home . I had a client who loved Chick-fil-A and this is a habit stacking example . Maybe we could talk about that . He loved his Chick-fil-A and I said you could just make exactly what they give you at home .

Philip Pape 46:02

It's like super simple ingredients and guess what ? You're going to save the walk or the drive to the place every day and you complain you don't have enough time to go for a walk . Well , there you go . Two birds in one stone , right . But meal prep and planning , it's just one of those things you said . It's changed . People think it's overwhelming in their brain . And then oven it takes me five minutes to prep and I can cook a whole starch or vegetable thing . It really is that , I agree . What about the habit stacking or something else that you talk about , which is like actions that have cascading or what are they called Knock-on effects or second order effects that make other things easier ? Can you give us some good examples where people can really leverage their time that way , beyond what you already have ?

Alex Feinberg 46:44

Train for intensity , doing high interval sprints right . So measure your interval sprints . Do them better today than you did them last week . What that's going to do is it's not only going to increase your resting metabolic rate , and exponentially so . So the better you get at them , the more it's going to increase your resting metabolic rate . Very likely it's also going to curb your hunger . And so people say , oh , you want to build lean mass ? Because lean mass increases your basal metabolic rate . It does . It doesn't actually increase your basal metabolic rate that much , otherwise powerlifters would be leaner than they are . But having a really high VO2 max , having really high cardiac output , absolutely increases your resting metabolic rate .

Alex Feinberg 47:28

I challenge you to find a guy who can run a six-minute mile , who's fat and it's not because , oh well , if you carry that much extra body weight , you can't run a six-minute mile . No , if you look at guys who are college-level runners , they're running 430 miles and , generally speaking , every pound you add will add about a second to your mile time . So there are people who have the genetic capability of running sub five minute miles . They're not going to be able to run sub six minute miles and carry 60 pounds more fat . They could run a sub six minute mile if they wore a 60 pound vest on them , but the fat itself isn't the thing that's making it hard for them to run . Actually , being able to run at a fast pace makes it very , very difficult for your body itself to hold fat . That doesn't mean you need to start running , especially if you weigh over 200 pounds . That could be more damaging to you than what the reward is . But you need to be able to do measurable cardio at a very , very fast rate , and the downstream effects of that are going to be greater than probably any other exercise you can select in the gym .

Alex Feinberg 48:40

The other thing is most people need to be working on what they ignore , right ? Most guys ? Oh , I work out all the time . Okay , so you do upper body all the gym . The other thing is you know most people need to be working on what they ignore , right ? Most guys ? Oh , I work out all the time . Oh , okay , so you do upper body all the time . How many days a week are you doing squats , like to parallel ? How many days a week are you doing cardio ? Oh , I'm not really good at that , okay , yeah , that's why you're doing .

Alex Feinberg 48:54

You're doing a frat bro workout with a frat bro diet and you wonder why you look like a 35 year old frat bro . That's like you need to train like an athlete . Athletes train legs . Legs have 55% of your muscle mass in them . Legs are ultimately what's going to keep us healthy , keep us at lower risk for breaking hips as we get older , as we can stay healthy and mentally alert .

Alex Feinberg 49:15

So we need to be training our lower bodies , we need to be training our cardiac capacity , our VO2 max , and the downstream effect of that is going to be enormous , because not only is it going to put us in a position to feel better and look better , you're going to start to realize that these mental frameworks , mental models , don't just apply to fitness . They apply to almost everywhere else in life . And once you start stacking wins , the momentum of those wins will be get other wins . It'll be easier for you to get promoted at work , easier for you to negotiate for more money with your next job , easier for you to get promoted at work , easier for you to negotiate for more money with your next job , easier for you to have better relationships with your wife or other women probably not both and you're going to see the downstream effects of just being a better winner .

Philip Pape 49:57

Yeah . So those are your massive leverage points right there . And you're kind of inspiring me again because less than a couple months ago we had two quick in succession episodes about sprinting , one with Brad Kearns he's co-wrote Bored to Walk with Mark Sisson . Highly recommend checking that out . He advocates a lot of what we talk about , which is you got to lift , got to sprint . It actually is kind of against long distance running , mainly because most people can't do it right . We can talk about that , but when you talk about sprinting , are you talking about , say , a couple of days a week on flat ground for , you know , 10 minutes of high recovery , low work intervals , or this is more like HIIT style , tabata style type sprints .

Alex Feinberg 50:34

It depends who you are Like . I don't actually I think sprints would be great for people to do . I am an ex-professional athlete . I haven't run a sprint in over 10 years , just because I don't think that I'm at the training level to where it it makes sense from a risk reward standpoint .

Alex Feinberg 50:49

Right , um , interval sprints I can do , and my interval sprints might be at the same speed as someone else's sprint , although they're like kind of the same speed that , like elite marathon runners can just run for 26 miles in a row .

Alex Feinberg 51:02

Um , so you know , my interval sprints are going to be like they're going to peak at like 12 to 13 miles an hour at a slight incline , and so that's going to be higher than most people's uh interval runs . But it's actually like , think about it , these Kenyan guys could run like 14 miles an hour for like three hours in a row , uh , without stopping . So you know , if you compare yourself to the wrong people , you'll get dejected and decide that it's not worth it to continue . But if you just compare yourself to the person you were a week ago , you'll find it invigorating to continue to push your upper limits , and so I don't think you need to be sprinting at a hundred percent max capacity , but I do think that you need to occasionally either be running or assault bike sprinting , especially if you're over 200 pounds at a capacity that is very challenging for you to do a couple of times a week .

Philip Pape 51:51

Good , yeah , no , I love it . That's great , especially the because it's anabolic and also , you mentioned , it could increase your expenditure quite dramatically if you're not

Final Thoughts & Contact Information

Philip Pape 52:00

already doing it . It also aligns with saying work on what you ignore , because most of us are not doing that piece of it , even if we're now into lifting . And I think you mentioned the hunger signals as well . Again , that's a really big thing , because people doing the more chronic metronomic cardio tend to have more hunger versus the ones doing the style that you're talking about . So , all right , really good . I know we're short on time here and there's probably more we could cover , but what's something that I didn't ask that you think would be really meaningful to cover ?

Alex Feinberg 52:26

Okay .

Alex Feinberg 52:26

So why you need to prioritize fitness over over work and why it's going to make sense for you and you're going to get paid back both ways , is not only due to the more energy that you have , but good looking people make more money , and so if you can make yourself into a high energy uh income magnet , money is going to be it's going to find you right A lot , and so the actual way that you're going to relate to the world is going to fundamentally change when you affirmatively decide that you're going to be a high performing , high physical output machine .

Alex Feinberg 52:59

It takes a little bit of a mental switch , but you just look at this , look at the studies good looking people get paid more money to do the same job as bad-looking people .

Alex Feinberg 53:09

It's just that is you need to realize that humans are primal and humans treat other humans who are in good shape better , and one of the keys that I learned when I was a student athlete at vanderbilt university is if you want to lose , find games where you have to play by the same rules as everybody else , and if you want to win , identify games where you can play by different sets of rules and run on an inside track relative to your competition . This was the same thing that I observed when I elevator pitched my way into Google with no experience in tech , just having the ability to speak well and look good in a custom tailored suit . It's helped me over and over in my career . Prioritizing fitness over getting promoted has allowed me to grow my income statement , grow my balance sheet , grow my professional network and ultimately succeed , not just financially but physically , and so most people need to be prioritizing their physical health in order to maximize their personal wealth .

Philip Pape 54:08

And I think people shy away from talking about that . I'm glad you did because it's just reality . I mean , I know it from looking around me at folks I work with . I know it from my own transformation over the last few years and I'm still working on that . But , like the way people receive you , the confidence you have , uh , just the you know stature walking into a room , all those are important things . So , especially in business , especially with high performance , and , like you said , it's an inside track because how many people are doing it ? It's it's like the elite you know 1% that are even doing that . So this has been great . A lot of really cool points here that you know we haven't quite covered on this show . So thank you for coming on . Where can people reach out to you , alex ?

Alex Feinberg 54:42

You find me on X . Find me on Instagram at Alex Feinberg one F , e , I , n , B E R G If you can't see it in the tagline , or go to Feinberg systemscom . You can see what I'm doing on the health side . Also , if you are a high powered executive and want to learn what I do for my high performing clients and send an inquiry note and we can get in touch that way , but my DMs are open you can find me on the major social media networks and we can chat more that way .

Philip Pape 55:13

Great . We'll put those in the show notes . Xig Feinberg systemscom . Alex , thanks so much for your time . Really enjoyed discussing this with you . You're a great communicator . Really really interesting concepts that you know I definitely agree with and more people could benefit from . So thank you .

Alex Feinberg 55:22

You're welcome . Thank you so much for having me .