Why Knowledge Isn’t Enough

Philip Pape 0:01

If you know exactly what to do for your fitness, you understand progressive overload, you know your macros, you dialed in your sleep, but you still can't maintain consistency for more than a few months. And when life throws you a curveball, whether that's travel, work stress, or just the mundane chaos of daily existence, your entire system collapses. Then this episode is for you because today I am talking with Alan Lazarus, CEO and co-host of Next Level University, about something that most fitness content tends to ignore. The meta architecture underneath your execution. What do I mean? Not another habit framework, not for motivation, but the engineering principles that determine whether your fitness survives contact with reality. You'll learn why the gap between knowing and sustaining exists, how to build buffer into your system so life's demands don't derail everything, and the specific meta skills that separate people who stay consistent for decades from those who restart every new year. And today we're going to look at why most people fail at fitness consistency despite having all the right information. My guest is Alan Lazarus. He is the CEO and co-host of Next Level University, a top 100 daily podcast with over 2,200 episodes now, reaching 175 countries. And what I genuinely respect about this man is he also thinks like an engineer like I do. He applies that mindset to human behavior. And if you look at his history, at 26, he had a near fatal car crash. It forced him to rebuild his approach to performance, to identity, to sustainable achievement. We love that word here, sustainable, the long-term results. And he's since built a multi-six-figure business helping high performers create what he calls meta systems or meta systems, however you want to pronounce it. And that is the architecture underneath the habits, the motivation, the willpower that determine long-term consistency. So today you're going to discover why such wide gaps often exist between knowing, doing, and sustaining your results, the specific components of a consistency architecture that hopefully can survive the messiness of real life and the meta skills that give you the highest leverage for long-term,

Meet Alan Lazarus And His Lens

Philip Pape 2:36

lifelong results. Alan, thank you, man, for coming on the show and doing this with me.

Alan Lazaros 2:39

Philip, gratitude first. Thank you for having me. I respect you and the work that you do in the world deeply. And you very much take your platform very, very seriously, which I appreciate.

Philip Pape 2:50

Thank you so much for saying that because I think professionalism is really important. And hopefully we all feed off of each other as we surround ourselves with the best and try to be the best. And today I kind of want to talk about that for the user or the user. Here I am thinking like an engineer, you and I talk about users for the listener and having this sort of system of meta skills. I think you and your partner, uh Kevin, who's part of the podcast production team behind me as well, just want to give him a shout-out, Kevin Palmeri, on next level university. You guys talk about meta skills and having a meta system. And my engineering brain immediately thinks the higher order skills that drive consistency across a domain. Maybe that's fitness, like we care about here. Maybe that's business, relationships. And I think of systems as opposed to specific methods, just like I think of principles as opposed to methods. What do you mean when you talk about meta skills? And then we're going to go from there.

Alan Lazaros 3:45

Okay. So there's a challenge skills sweet spot that have you ever read the book, The Art of Impossible, by Stephen Cotler? Yes, I have. Yes. Okay. Awesome. Yeah. So it's Stephen Cotler is one of the top researchers of flow and getting in the zone, which obviously is critical for fitness. And he talks about the challenge skills sweet spot, how you can't get in the zone until you're in the challenge skills sweet spot, which basically means it needs to be outside your comfort zone and challenging and exciting enough to be outside your skills, but also within your comfort zone enough to where you're not. Basically, stretch yourself as much as possible without snapping. I think of skills as if skills are in the center, there are sub-skills underneath. So, for example, effective communication is a skill, a sub-skill underneath that would be storytelling. A meta skill would be thinking about how you're telling a story and the understanding the hero's journey architecture of a story. So meta-skills are very cognitive. Skills are something that you do in practice, deep practice. I know you've talked about that on your show. And then subskills are the little nuance things that you practice underneath a skill. So I think of it from bottom to top. It would be sub-skills, skills, meta skills. And one of the things that I've found is when you see someone's career and their career is what you try to do, or what I try to do, there's a book called Decoding Greatness. What I try to do is reverse engineer sort of their journey. I think of it like a graph. Okay, where did they start? Where are they now? And where are they headed? And the sort of overnight success thing of when you see a physique, it didn't fall out of the sky. There are certain supplements they're taking, they're sleeping a certain way, they're hydrating a certain way. Everything that they're doing behind the scenes, you almost have to deduce. And there's meta-skills, skills, and subskills that they have that you might not have yet. Some of them came naturally, and in some cases, they don't even know that they have them. Um, and in some cases, they had to develop them consciously over time. So to me, that's a very simple way to explain something that's extremely complicated is what are the subskills, skills, and meta-skills that you need to achieve a specific outcome in terms of physique, is what we're talking about now. But that works for business, that works for success, that works for goals, that works for relationships, all that.

Philip Pape 5:59

Yeah, and I appreciate frameworks and hierarchies like that. I think it's also helpful because sometimes I think people get stuck if they're focused on building a skill and something is not working. It could be that the meta skill needs more support. Or I suppose it could be that they're not breaking it down to the proper level of process-related goals that get them to the skill. So you mentioned the challenge skills sweet spot, and I think of, again, a spectrum from um, you know, I think I think I think of a spectrum when

Meta Skills, Skills, And Subskills

Philip Pape 6:26

you talk about flow, where like, is playing video games on a couch flow because you're, you know, absorbed in it and time is flying by, but yet it's not challenging to develop skills. Now, assume somebody could argue against that. Um and conversely, it's something that is so hard that you cannot even improve because it's so beyond your level, you know, the opposite end of that, right? Right. And that's kind of what I think about. The first place I learned about flow, and I think the book you mentioned was uh a positive psychology, the idea being that flow is one of those elements of the good life of having, you know, meaning and purpose, yes, right, that you can find flow in something. So now people are listening, like, okay, where are these guys going with this? Yeah. I want to kind of tie that to fitness. You say you've reverse engineer somebody's journey. Take something very simple, take strength training, you know, training consistency, which is a big holdup for a lot of folks. Where would someone think about the mental framework with the skills, the meta skills, and the subskills for that?

Alan Lazaros 7:25

You know, it's interesting because when it comes to fitness, a lot of this I haven't teased out. A lot of this is in my subconscious and unconscious, and I'm glad we're talking about it. Let's do it. The best way. So you talked about video games and video games, you do develop skills, hand-eye coordination. There's something called a RTS, a real-time strategy game, where you have to think in time and all that kind of stuff.

Philip Pape 7:47

So I tell my wife that all the time, by the way. Okay, nice. Yes, yeah, developing skills.

Alan Lazaros 7:51

So here's the thing, right? So a great film like Avatar, for example, gets you into flow. Time slips away, you're fully immersed, and all of a sudden you're immersed in a new world, you get all the neurochemistry, which is what flow basically people who have the most flow in their life, they've done studies, they are the most fulfilled and the most meaning and the most purpose. You already mentioned that. The problem is after you watch a great show or a great film, you're the same. The hero that you watched in the film, you were simulating the emotions and the flow of being immersed in that world. But when you get off the couch having watched Avatar, you're not any stronger. Maybe you're a little smarter because you can learn from film, but you're not, you didn't actually develop any tangible skills that you can now go use. And so to go back to your original point, though, when it comes to fitness, I think that fitness, whatever your modality, you can you can talk CrossFit, you can talk bodybuilding, you can talk strength training, which is what we're gonna get to. But any modality of fitness that you pick, it should be, in my opinion, optimized around something that you, even if it's painful, you are always glad you did it. I don't want to say you would love to do it because a lot of times that trips people up. I I always say you don't know you love something because you always want to do it. You know you love something because you're always glad you did.

Philip Pape 9:09

Yes.

Alan Lazaros 9:09

That makes total sense. Right. I don't always want to weight train, but I'm always glad I did. Yep. And so pick something that creates a lot of flow because that flow has shown two or three hours after that, the runner's high, the zone, after a great workout, you're gonna feel accomplished. You're also gonna be stronger andor better cardiovascular health. And so back to the skills piece. Strength training, the meta skills for strength training is consistency. Another meta skill for strength training is tracking. So you know how much you bench press, so do I. You know how much you squat, so do I. You know how much when you go into the gym, you my goal in that every workout is how do I get a little bit better this time than last time? Sometimes I accomplish it, sometimes I don't. And Phil, I think that uh you'll probably geek out with me a little bit on this. And I don't know if you've heard me say this on the podcast, but I researched this, and this is something that I think your listeners will be fascinated by. So you've heard of the aggregation of marginal gains, James Clear, Tiny Habits, BJ Fogg, all that kind of stuff. Okay, so for those of you out there who haven't read Atomic Habits Yet, I highly recommend that you do. It's a very, very great book. But ultimately, I created my own sort of flavor of this, which is I I put a dollar in a financial calculator and I grew it by 0.1% every day for 50 years. Now, when you do this, it becomes almost 84 million dollars. Now, the kicker, and this is the meta skill of consistency, this is the reason why to do it. I do this with all my clients. I pull up the financial calculator, put a dollar in, I put a 50 years, which is 18,000 something days. I do 365 times 50. And then it shows 84 million dollars, almost 83, I round it up. And I said, What happens if I take weekends off? So there's 52 weeks a year. If you take weekends off, it comes to $439,000. So you let's say that you don't take weekends off and you get a little better each day, every day, seven days a week, and I only do it five days a week, you have 191 times the outcome that I do. And that's the that's an example of a meta skill, like thinking about your thinking and thinking about because everyone knows you should work out, but if you don't have enough why, enough reasons why, if you don't understand the mathematics, mathematics is a meta skill, cognitive skill underneath fitness. That's why we're talking about the engineering thing. And so I know some people who have the subskills and the skills, but not the meta-skills, so they don't leverage the compound effect. And then I know some people who know the math but don't execute. And so that's kind of my long-winded answer to your question. But if you want to go through the meta skills, skills, and subskills of fitness and how to succeed in fitness, I do think that would probably be of value.

Philip Pape 12:04

Yeah, before we do that, I want to poke on this consistency piece because first I want to define what we mean at Egan's Nebulous for a lot of folks, what consistency even means. Um, you gave uh an example I can take away from the financial example where seven days versus five days, some might argue five days is super consistent for something, right? Like you're doing it X percent of the time, all the time,

Flow, Challenge, And Real Progress

Philip Pape 12:25

forever, and therefore you're consistent, even though the output's different. So is one person more consistent, right? That's the first question. And then I want to play devil's advocate and ask why is consistency a meta-skill versus an outcome of other skills or meta skills?

Alan Lazaros 12:41

Um, I think I consider consistency a meta-skill, because if you don't have the cognitive understanding of why it matters, you kind of just won't do it.

Philip Pape 12:53

Okay.

Alan Lazaros 12:53

And and so here's here's some examples. So if you understand the science of habits, if you understand the science of the compound effect and the aggregation of marginal gains, and you understand the science of how to actually sustain something long-term in terms of longevity, but also not burn out. Learning how to not burn out is another in order to it's it's really easy to say you should exercise every day for the rest of your life. The truth is, I actually believe that. It doesn't mean you should run a marathon every day. I've exercised with my beautiful girlfriend March 1st of 2022. We I I came to her and I said, Sweetheart, I want to beat my old best. And she said, Well, what do you mean? And I said, Well, the the most I've ever worked out consistently, exercised consistently is three and a half months. I was during my master's program, I had nothing going on. To me, I went from engineer engineering to an MBA, which compared to engineering, getting your master's in business is a joke. And then everything, yeah, everything compared to engineering is a joke. Um, honestly. One of the hardest things I've ever done was engineering. But that said, I basically exercised every day for three and a half months. And March 1st of 2022, now, which is wild to think about, I said, I want to beat my old best. I'm going for four months. I need to go 120 days straight. And she's like, I'll do it with you. We did that, and then we surpassed the 120 days, and I said, We did it. Awesome. And then she said, Let's go for a year. And then I I'll never forget this pony of the garage. We hit 365 days because I'm big on tracking. I have Google Sheets and I track all my metrics. And I said, We did it. She said, Did what? And I said, We did a year. And she turned to me, no hesitation. She said, Let's do this for the rest of our life. And I had a mini panic attack. Uh, because I was like, I can't make this promise to you or to myself unless I actually do it. This is a side tangent, but if you break the promises you make to yourself, you're basically gonna have no self-esteem and no self-respect, and you're not gonna build belief and self-worth. And so for me, I do not break promises to myself. I I okay, sometimes I do. I try really hard not to. I try really hard not to, because it's just a little a dollar in the bank account of your self-worth. Dollar in the bank account. Say you go to the gym, go to the gym, keep the promise. That's just how you invest in yourself. So I said, I can't do this unless you're serious. Like for the rest of our life, that's that's a big commitment. Now, I want to make this very clear jogging counts, swimming counts, walking my dog counts. The minimum is a half an hour, 30 minutes a day, every day, steady state cardio, hit training, weight training, it all counts. And we've been doing that now since March 1st of 2022, which I did yesterday, I crunched my numbers, is 3.6 years ago. Now we've bumped it from 30 to 35, 35 to 40, went back to 30, then we got it to 45, then we got it to an hour. So now we're doing an hour. That is kind of crazy. It's been very hard to sustain, honestly. That said, I believe in consistency very, very deeply. But what I've come to realize, and I have 20 clients, so I'm not just talking. I did fitness coaching for a long time. I said, anyone can teach you how to lose weight, but almost no one can get you to actually do it. Getting you to actually do it means you have to understand yourself, self-awareness, you have to understand the human condition, intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and you have to understand how to poke your own buttons. I am infinitely more likely to exercise consistently, and uh this is the humble pie piece. There's no way I would have exercised every day for 3.6 years without Emilia. No way. The accountability that you have from not wanting to let her down, and then once you get a streak, the psychology underneath that. I mean, what are the chances I'm not going to exercise tonight? Oh, I went for 3.6 years and then I canned it. It gets once you have a streak going, you ha you hang on so deeply to that streak and it holds you accountable. A lot of people think I'm out of my mind. I understand that. You don't have to do what I'm doing. But what I will say is that I consider consistency a meta skill because there's so much thinking. Not to mention, you also have to design and optimize your entire life around that. Yeah. Which is lifestyle design. So if you think you're just gonna exercise every day for the rest of your life and then just kind of wing it, you there's no way. We just traveled last week. We were on a road trip from Massachusetts to South Carolina and back in one week, and exercise was infinitely more difficult. I mean, we were walking around the Tesla chargers, right? And and so you the meta, I call it meta because you have to think about your thinking constantly. You have to be thinking about yourself and what motivates you because you have to be able to poke your own buttons, basically. You have to be able to coach yourself in real time.

Philip Pape 17:39

Yeah, I was thinking about a conversation I recently had with Adam Schaefer of Mind Pump before he's I think his episode's coming out right before yours. So no pressure, you know, follow him, right? Oh shit. And he's talking about how um he, you know, at his current phase of life where his six-year-old kid is one of the most important things right now, scaling his business. He's already built plenty of muscle, he's been shredded multiple times in his life. All he cares about is maintaining his fitness right now, and it doesn't take much to do that. Yeah, you know, for him, his system of consistency is always there and it might ebb and flow with like the priorities and it might get applied to a different outcome and he might require less effort, right? Because we know the compounding effect of habits often uh feeds into itself and does make these things almost, I'll say, inevitable. Even with your car trip, it's like even if you went the whole trip and didn't do that every day, you'd get right back to it. And that's kind of like that rubber band kind of hardly been stretched, is the is my thought uh for that. I don't know if that makes sense, but you did mention not burning out, and I think then sustainability and not burning out and having a system where it's the minimum effective dose is the minimum, and then not having such a high standard for yourself on a daily basis that's impossible to, you know, keep. And it's like somewhere in there, right? Like I imagine it it can shift. Like, does your minimum half hour or hour a day ever change during a specific phase, or is it always that?

Alan Lazaros 19:05

It it did change. So we started out with 30 minutes, and I'll tell you right now, if we had started out with an hour and a half or something, there's no way. There's just no way. We run three businesses between the two of us. So the minimum viable product in business is is we call it a minimum viable habit, which is MVH. So for us, it was 30 minutes a day because I knew we could sustain that to start. And you know what's really kind of wild about this? I used to do fitness competitions, I've got these sort of trophies behind me, blah, blah, blah. But Kevin and I let it go for a while. We and I I don't want to say we let it go. We weren't out of shape, but we weren't competitor level freaks of nature like we once were. When I first met Kev, this dude was an animal fill. I mean, this, I mean, it's unbelievable. And I playfully joked with him. I said, Kevin, this is next level university, not dad bod university.

Philip Pape 19:55

Yeah.

Alan Lazaros 19:57

Because him and I lost it after COVID. He didn't work out for like three or four months. And I was I went from basically in a gym that was bodybuilder gym. It's called Impact Fitness in Massachusetts. And this is like, I mean, you go there and you're gonna get eaten. It's it's great, it's awesome. And I was overhead pressing 225. Like for bodybuilders, it it was like I was on it. And then I was out of the gym for three and a half months during COVID. I could not go to the gym. I'm working out in my closet doing chin-ups. I'm trying to I'm I only have 35-pound dumbbells, so I can't when you build a physique on certain equipment and then that equipment gets taken. I'm not one for excuses, but it's very hard to you can't squat 250 pounds when you don't have the equipment. And I couldn't go to the gym. So the gym's opened. I cry on my way to the gym, happy tears,

Consistency As A Meta Skill

Alan Lazaros 20:45

happy tears. And I I blew my groin. I tried to get right back to where I was, I got injured, I was outside the challenge skill suite spot to your point. But back to the minimum viable habit. One of the things that's been really fascinating is I am just now, and I know this sounds crazy, three and a half years into consistent daily exercise. I'm just now feeling the benefits of it. Like there have been a few videos I've posted on my Instagram recently where it's like, wow, I actually feel like an athlete again. Because one of the things people don't tell you when you compete in fitness is you peak early. I was 27, 28 years old, in optimal conditioning. My whole world was fitness, no household, no three businesses. You know, my whole I was a fitness model, fitness competitor, fitness coach, 43 photo shoots, like my whole world was fitness back then. And then you grow these companies and you have a 19-person team, and all of a sudden fitness takes a back seat. And so, back to your original question though, you have to have a minimum that you hit no matter what, and then you can slowly ramp that up. We tried to go from 30 to 45, we had to go back to 30. And now we've been able to sustain the hour for probably the last like four months, which has been really good. It's not been easy. So, yesterday I'll give an example. We we went to the gym, we both woke up a little bit late. We had our first calls at 11 a.m. And we got to the gym and we were sitting there in the car going, There's no way. We're not gonna make our first meeting. I said, We gotta do 35. So we did 35 weights and then we did 25 walking in the evening. So we still got the hour in, but we broke it into two. So you don't have to be perfect, you just have to have a minimum that you always hit. Our new minimum is an hour. And I told Amelia, I said, listen, we are not going more than that. If I'm exercising every day for the rest of my life, I'm not doing more than an hour. And if you want to start out, and this is what people do in New Year's resolutions, they say I want to do, you know, five days a week, three hours. No, start small and ramp up. Start small, actually hit and ramp up. Not everybody can be Kobe Bryant level four a days. And he didn't start there either. He was he was doing, you know, one a days, then it was two a days, then it was three a days, then it was four a days, from 13 years old all the way to, you know, when he was 38 or whatever it was. So at the end of the day, you got to start small and build. And I would much rather this is why humility is so important. Yeah. I think self-belief is I know I can do this. I think humility is I know I'm not gonna do this unless I stay humble enough to make it feasible. And I think self-belief and humility rare rarely go hand in hand. Usually someone has a lot of humility and low self-belief and they're kind of self-deprecating, or they have a ton of self-belief that they're sort of delusional and they can never stay consistent because they they are you know overly optimistic.

Philip Pape 23:33

Yeah, and these are the kind of concepts you guys talk about on your show all the time. That's why I encourage the listener to check it out. Um, you specifically are a numbers guy, uh, and and that goes through my mind. Just real quick, uh, Kevin said he didn't know another engineer. You need to correct that. I went to RPI, I know you went to WPI. Nice. Somehow he doesn't know this, so I need to educate him. Yeah, you do. He does. He says, I've I don't even know any other engineers.

Alan Lazaros 23:54

I'm like, oh my god, how many engineers do you know? Just real quick. 50 of them at least. Yeah, well, I know hundreds, right? Because I'm in the space. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So when he said that, that blew my mind. I was like, wait, what? My whole world has been engineers, you know. It's funny, it's funny.

Philip Pape 24:09

Engineers are definitely a specific breed. My wife and I joke all the time about it because she was a teacher and comparing our two worlds when she was, but now she's a stay-at-home mom, but it was pretty funny. Um, nice. I love engineers, though. But so, and the listener really understands when we get into this stuff that I am a big fan of tracking in numbers and everything, but there's there's a reason for it. I think it's very efficient, and math is like a beautiful universal language of abstraction to something that is atomic almost, right? It's like simple to represent something with math. You don't have to know calculus, you don't have to know differential equations, just very simple, you know, numbers. And so when you say something like the five versus seven day example, you know, I think uh of some of the counterintuitive findings in nutrition science, like there was a study that compared five to seven days of weighing yourself, not zero versus five or seven, but five versus seven. Exactly. And found that seven days led to better long-term outcomes. And you're like, well, that's interesting. That two-day difference of consistency made a huge difference. So, my question then for you is you have this daily practice, this daily minimum. I think of fitness as different pillars that we kind of have to all put together, right? You've got training, you've got, I put movement in a separate bucket, but could argue that nutrition, right? Sleep, stress. There's like these big buckets. But when we talk about the fitness side of it, the different modalities and burnout and stimulus versus fatigue, you know, we we pretty well understand that you can't push it too hard on, say, the lifting weights piece before you go into that uh unrecovered regime, which gets even worse when you're in a fat loss phase and you don't have the energy for it. So if you're running like a three-day-a-week program, would you say to someone, the other four days have have a substitute activity that's like equivalent? Is that how we do it for that to kind of keep it linear?

Alan Lazaros 26:03

Yeah, people don't like me for this, but I'm not here to be liked, I'm here to I'm here to add value. Uh fitness is a full-time job.

Philip Pape 26:11

Yeah.

Alan Lazaros 26:12

And and there should be something that you're doing every day for your physique. I I do build the self, build the family, build the business every day. Every day. You move the needle every day. So so I have a pyramid, and you're a systems guy, and I agree with you on the mathematics. I say without mathematics, take away this TV, take away Restream, take away this microphone, take away iPhone, yeah, take away everything. Listen, math is the epicenter of all great creations. And if you don't know mathematics, you don't need, like you said, you don't need to know calculus, but you do, there is benefits to calculus, rate of change over time. If you don't like math, I would say you're leaving a lot of opportunity on the table. You don't have to be an engineer, but you have to learn some math. And and one of the things I wanted to be a math teacher when I was a kid, and now I joke, I say, now I teach math to business owners. And when I was a kid, I said um I wanted to be a math teacher so desperately, and I said, well, they don't make enough money, unfortunately. Unfortunately. And now I teach math to business owners. It's fascinating. But back to the framework here, I agree with you on the buckets. So I have a pyramid of fitness that I created back in my fitness coaching days. Now, the cool thing about a pyramid in geometry is that in order for it to climb higher, it has to have a stronger foundation. And you mentioned we talk about burnout. One of the things that I think, you know, if I were to just come on here and and and just arrogantly say, hey, I haven't, I haven't missed a day of exercise in 3.6 years, that doesn't do it justice because the only reason I can do that is because of the other things you're not seeing me do. That's one component of the ladder, the pyramid. Training is one seventh of the equation, uh, in my opinion, from my perspective. So the bottom is sleep. I track my sleep every single day. I'm sure that you do. Aura is unbelievable. Do whatever you gotta do, track your sleep, even if you do it manually. So sleep

Streaks, Accountability, And Burnout

Alan Lazaros 28:02

is the foundation. When I get bad sleep, I feel like the sky is falling. So I got an 83 sleep score last night, so I'm in a good place. I feel good. When I don't get good sleep, I was on the road last week. It was very hard to perform. It was very hard to come here and add value. It was very hard to get all my work done and to have the willpower necessary to do what I gotta do. So sleep is the bottom of the pyramid. And the better you get sleep, the better all the rest go. And if you're arrogant enough to think you're gonna exercise every day and get crappy sleep, I I just you need some humble pie. So sleep is the bottom. So I do I'll give them all and then I'll go through them. So sleep, hydration, nutrition, training, mobility, breath work, and supplementation. Those are my seven. And supplementation is the top of it, meaning the importance of it is the least. The fitness industry, which what what do they sell? Supplements. So obviously, everyone is gonna overemphasize the importance of supplements until you're sleeping well, hydrating, until you're doing the other pillars, supplementation is exactly that. It's supposed to be a supplement, but most people overly focus on that. Hey, what's your stack? And are you taking creatine and all this stuff? To me, it's it's about sleep first, hydration second. I've got my Vita Coca water right here. Boom. Not a plug. I do not get paid by Vita Coca, I just love them. Okay, sleep, hydration, nutrition, which is calories, micros, macros. Sleep, hydration, nutrition, training. Training is any form of movement. You mentioned movement. I I call it training, which I think is intentional movement. Sleep, hydration, nutrition, training, mobility. That's the one I struggle with most. I can I cannot be consistent limiting belief. I struggle to be consistent with mobility. That's been the hardest for me. Everyone I've ever coached, in fitness or otherwise, struggles with one of these seven really bad.

Philip Pape 29:57

Let me guess. You've a waste of time or Not a big fan of it or whatever. Or does it work done not helping or whatever. Not a fan. It definitely helps. I'm not deluding myself.

Alan Lazaros 30:07

There's a reason somebody tends to be less consistent. You know what it what it is? I won't do it unless I'm learning.

Philip Pape 30:12

Okay.

Alan Lazaros 30:13

I need to do it while learning. But foam rolling, stretching, bands, that whole nine. So sleep, hydration, nutrition, training, mobility, breath work. This is one that I didn't have until way later. And I don't know how familiar you are with breath work.

Philip Pape 30:26

I mean box breathing and all the different techniques. Yeah, sure.

Alan Lazaros 30:29

Yeah, exactly. So breathing properly. And then supplementation is last. So I don't, I don't, I do creatine, I do magnesium and melatonin before bed. I I do of multivitamin. That's pretty much my supplementation. Yeah, exactly. So but to me, those are the seven that matter. And in order to do all seven consistently, it is a full-time job. Don't get it twisted. Most people are not healthy. And I wasn't either in the past. So I'm I get it. You know, back in my engineering days in corporate, I was I was drinking too much and too often, and I was 160 pounds, skinny fat, not healthy. And I'll never go back. But if you sit there and say, I want to be healthy, I want to be fit, I want to build my physique, you basically have to make it think of it like a full-time job. You know, every single day you should be moving the needle on something for sure.

Philip Pape 31:22

Unfortunately, sleep should slot in for a third of that day no matter what, right? And the right and then the rest of the waking hours have the rest. At least a third, yeah. But it's an interesting list. I've heard you talk about it before, and we don't have to like argue over what should be in the list because everybody might have their own little different things. What I find interesting, and you can help me understand this, is let's put this in the context of skills, of subskills, skills, and meta skills. When I think um nutrition, to me, that's like a massive bucket, a massive pillar that encompasses so many things. Um I mean, it's everything you eat, right? But it's all the things tied to that, corollary to that. When I think of breath work, to me, that's a very specific application of, let's say, mindfulness or relaxation or stress management. And I would almost say, like, oh, which of these do not belong, right? Like on the IQ test where you look at how they all compare, and I'd say, well, I might actually want stress management as a higher level than breath work, kind of like sleep. You don't talk about the sleep hacks and such. Nice. Where does your mind go with that? And then we can talk about the meta skills and skills.

Alan Lazaros 32:22

Well, the breath work, I think, is also while you're training, how you're breathing while you're training, the certain way you breathe while you run, the certain way you breathe while you do uh strength training. But I do like the stress management piece. And the other piece of this too, and I had, you know, I've had a lot of really smart people in my life, so they've they've always came with different it's like minerals, no. Uh I like your stress, also hormones. So some one person came to me, Amy. I don't know if you know Amy Lenny, she's on our team, uh, but she said, Alan, you forgot hormones. And I said, Well, yes and no. And again, there's a lot of nuances to this, but if you do sleep, hydration, nutrition, training, mobility, breath work, and supplementation well, obviously hormones are a byproduct. So, and then obviously, you know, a lot of athletes unfortunately do steroids. And we're not gonna have that conversation, I don't think. I'm I'm a natural athlete, I've never personally done steroids, I never intend on it. I used to compete with people who did, which was very unfair, um, which is one of the reasons I lost two of my three shows. But it's like, well, there's a there's a drug test. Yeah, well, they I didn't say they were running a cycle right now, but they definitely were three months ago, that I promise you. But anyways, so at the end of the day, I like the stress management. I think that if I were to replace breath work, I would probably go with that. Oh, because I think that's a very that's very important because as an athlete, you kind of have to not let anxiety take you. Because you're you know as well as I do, like when anxiety spikes and cortisol spikes, your test levels plummet. So you gotta be very mindful of how stress stressed out you get. One of the problems with meta skills being an engineer is engineers are thinking all the time. Always 24-7-365, right? It's always going. So it's very hard for there aren't a lot of like really in shape engineers. I'm not trying to be mean, there just aren't. And one of the reasons why is because we're so we think about the past and the future so often. And uh high IQ is very rarely correlated with low stress levels.

Philip Pape 34:28

Yeah, it's true. Um, you know, which I guess this whole discussion about this pyramid, honestly, it could be its own podcast when we talk about these different levels, right? Because now you got me thinking about mindfulness in general permeating all of this, the sympathetic versus parasympathetic nervous system being so crucial to your health. And then you mentioned hormones, and my mind goes to blood work and how your biomarkers are a reflection of your hydration and nutrition, and how supplementation is potentially a subset of nutrition, right? So anyway, we don't want to go. This is the thinking. I love this. This is the overthink RPI versus WPI.

Alan Lazaros 35:01

By the way, I'm totally curious. And you don't mind if I call you Phil? Is it Philip? It's Philip. Philip. Okay, Philip. Sorry about that. It's not going to be Philip. I'm sure I'm not the only one who made that mistake, right? Uh, did you end up applying to because I applied to RPI, WPI, and MIT. I didn't I didn't apply to MIT. I wish that I did. Did you end up applying to WPI?

Philip Pape 35:19

No, I didn't. I was from Florida, so I wasn't actually even familiar with a lot of the schools up here. So it was like RPI, Cornell, MIT. Where are you?

Alan Lazaros 35:26

Where are you hailing now? Sorry, I'm not sure.

Philip Pape 35:28

Yeah. Okay, so I stayed up here. I mean from Florida. I stayed in New York.

Alan Lazaros 35:31

I stayed in New England. So we near each other. I'm a huge fan of New England, man. I just drove from Mass to South Carolina, as I mentioned, and uh I I missed home. I missed New England's great. New England's great. Yeah, three months out of the year suck, but the rest are awesome. Yeah, you know, the contrast is nice.

Philip Pape 35:47

Like that's I um there's a concept in Finland. I think it's Finland. Uh there's a Den Denmark called uh Higa, H Y G G E. Familiar with this concept? It'd be a cool I think that'd be a cool episode for you guys to talk about actually. Higa is the idea of embracing the weather no matter what it is, with with positivity and like embracing it to its fullest. So when it's really cold, that means blankets and fire and dressing up really warmly and saying, like, yeah, no excuses. It's kind of a no excuses mentality, but not from a die hard, you know, mentality. But hey, this is the world, this is the planet Earth. Um, so okay, so circling some of this in, because we mentioned the engineering. Uh, where was I gonna go with this? Engineers being out of shape. Um, yeah, I see it every day. It's yeah, it's the thinking, it's also the lifestyle, it's also, you know, I mean, there's a lot of sedentary professions as well that correlate with or I also think some of it's cultural.

Alan Lazaros 36:41

Yeah. Because if you get your value from being smart, which most engineers

Minimum Viable Habit And Scaling

Alan Lazaros 36:45

do, you don't need to be, you know, jacked or whatever it is. I it always bothered me how people are so one-dimensional. And again, I don't mean people in general, not everyone is, but I I I hated how you had to be smart or athletic. Yes. Or you had to be like good looking or intelligent. You can't be both. And and for me, I I used I was gonna write a book called The Best of Both Worlds, and my whole I didn't want to just be one-dimensional. I wanted to be healthy, wealthy, and in love. I I didn't want to just be because I have a bunch of millionaire friends, as you do from college, that it's like, what are you doing, brother? Like, why why don't you it's you obviously have the time and money. So, like, what's the what's the disconnect here, right? It and and it does, it frustrates me because I don't want to see them suffer, and their potential is so much greater than that. These people are brilliant. And why aren't you applying your brilliance to your health?

Philip Pape 37:38

Yeah, I I think that applies even I think that applies to multiple skills that are outside what your domain is, and and what I mean by that is I so I've seen engineers who get in shape, myself among them, right? Where there is an advantage to that for sure. You would think there's not, but there is because people start treating you differently. You get a little bit more respect, you have more energy, you could you show up more in a different way. Now, maybe if you take it too far and get too jacked, maybe people be like you're a meathead now. And and you see plenty of CEOs and vice presidents who are overweight and it doesn't obviously hold them back necessarily uh until they have that heart attack or you know, their work life is cut short. But I think there's even other domains like public speaking. Engineers don't dive into that because they feel like it's not a skill that they need until they need it, you know. And there's skills like music, you know, creativity, create creative uh endeavors, whether it's music or something else. I I played jazz in in high school, I was at uh arts high school, which again is weird being an engineer, but there's a lot of overlap between music and math and engineering. And it just opens up the creative mind. So sorry, you get me thinking about all of these things. I love it, man.

Alan Lazaros 38:46

And one of the reasons I think engineers don't typically become public speakers is because math modalities of thinking have a really hard time communicating effectively. I this will be a very side quick side tangent, but I I don't know if you've heard ever heard me talk about the four modalities of thinking.

Philip Pape 39:00

Probably. I've heard hundreds of your episodes, so okay.

Alan Lazaros 39:03

I appreciate you. You probably heard it, but basically the the rarest one is math, statistics, probabilities, equations, formulas. The most common one is words, conversations, and concepts. Then there's vision, pictures, and images, and then there's the second rarest, which is energy, intuition, and vibe. And women tend to be better at that one. So we all have all four, but we we have a really good one and a really bad one. My really good one is mathematics. My really bad one was energy. I just wasn't reading the vibe. I didn't, you know, I grew up in a very low vibe environment and I didn't understand. So Amelia fortunately has helped me with that, and I've helped her on the math side. But engineers struggle to communicate. I mean, even in this episode, I know I I seem like maybe a strong communicator, but I want to be honest with all of you. It is very hard for me to get what my engineering brain thinks to be said. It's it's insane. Like I can relate, man. I think in the the X, Y, and Z axis. Like everything's a graph for me. So it's very hard to articulate it. And and then here's the biggest problem. And this has been really hard for me in business because I'm a business coach. For people who don't think in mathematics, it's very hard. I have this remarkable, so I I I pull this up and I can draw it out. It's been unbelievable the unlocks because these engineering concepts are unbelievably valuable in business. And if you don't understand numbers and exponential growth, like think about it just for a second. Imagine, Philip, if you didn't know what exponential growth actually meant, you couldn't possibly understand the economy. Everything's exponential, that nothing grows linearly. So it's either an exponential decay or exponential increase. And and I've come to realize through coaching so many people that we are so missing that. We're missing the mathematic understanding of a penny that doubles every day for 31 days, halfway in it's five bucks, and it's it ends up being 10.3 million dollars. So nobody, even even the 84 million, one dollar becomes 84 million in 50 years. In 10 years, it's only 38 bucks or whatever. So I don't think anyone taught us this stuff, and it bothers me so much because us engineers have it. We know it, we understand it, yeah, but but we aren't able to communicate it, and including myself. I mean, it's brutal.

Max 41:18

Shout out to Philippe. I know Philly for a long time, and 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 recommendations on 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 suspendingly. If a scientifically sound, healthy diet and a link, strong body is what you're looking for, uh Philip Pape is your guide.

Philip Pape 42:03

Yeah, I totally agree with that. Um, it's an ongoing skill of trying to tell that story. It's effectively a story we're trying to tell is convert what's in our brain into something you understand over there, you know, in your brain. It's like telepathy spoken out loud, and now you're trying to make it work. Uh so what is your concept? Are you familiar with the dichotomy of intuitive eating versus like tracking your macros? Those kinds of concepts always pop in my head because, first of all, they're camps that don't necessarily need to exist here because there's so much overlap. But secondly, I can't ever grasp why somebody would want to flail around and try to figure things out, quote unquote, intuitively without having developed some skill. And I think intuition is a just a highly tuned sense of skill that now you need, don't need the training wheels anymore, or something to that effect. Does that resonate with you? Well said.

Alan Lazaros 42:55

Yeah. People say, well, just trust your gut. Well, what if your gut is conditioned horribly wrong? Yeah. Like, okay, so I'll give you an example. I had a stepfather, and he and I didn't get along well. And I was interviewing uh someone, or I was being interviewed by someone. His name's Tim Malansen. He has a podcast called the Work at Home Rock Star. He was a client of mine. I coached him for a while, and I had to work through this. He looks just like my stepdad. He's got the beard and everything. And I remember being like, what am I? I'm so triggered by this guy. Tim is the nicest guy ever. And it was like, so my intuition was saying, run. This is not good. You know, it reminds me of all the pain from my childhood. And that's not accurate. I had to work through that. So a lot of people say, well, oh, I just intuitively eat, or I just, I just go with my gut. I think that that's very, yeah, maybe that works if your gut is honed and if you've developed that skill over time. So for example, I intuitively eat now, but I don't really. I tracked macros and calories to the grain of rice for three years, and I have a mathematic modality of thinking. You know, a banana has 120 calories, an apple has 90. Like I'm not just winging it. And and so you see people with results who say they're intuitively eating, and then you apply that and go, oh, well, if that person doesn't have to track, then I certainly don't. When in reality, that person probably tracked for three or four years and now can intuitively do it because their intuition is honed, because they've developed a subskill, a skill, and a meta skill that's and I think that that's one thing I'll make very clear too. You know, there's a lot of wonderful people out there, but the success is a byproduct of skill development. It's not like I can't even tell you how many wonderful human beings I've met that are wildly unsuccessful, not just in fitness, but in life. And it and it hurts me. It hurts me. They could be so amazing, but they don't have the skills, sub skills, and meta skills necessary to actually win. And that's actually what my whole coaching practice is built around now is how do you give other people skills? You don't. Kevin is a great example. I've been coaching him for eight years. That dude is a machine now. I mean, when I first met him, his intuition would have drove him off a cliff. And now he just he's a machine. It's unbelievable what people are capable of, but it takes constant deep practice and training and checking in and measuring

The Seven-Pillar Fitness Pyramid

Alan Lazaros 45:10

and metrics and all that kind of stuff. So it's really, I think it's hard when I go on the internet and I hear like self-discipline doesn't work and you just go with the flow. It's it's no, that's no. Imagine if Apple was like, Yeah, we don't really track anything, we just go with the flow. It's it Michael Phelps' coach, yeah, just swim around, you know.

Philip Pape 45:28

So what's what's above meta? Uber? Yeah. Because what comes to mind here is we need we need almost talk about the Uber skill of developing meta skills as the principal uh here rather than the specific skills. We'll we'll get to that, but before before, um Philip, Philip, you would, you would only engineers can complicate this. Exactly. Um, I think of two past guests that I've had uh recently. Well, one, he's been on three times, Dr. Eric Helms, uh WNBF Pro. Love the guy. Yeah, he and I actually just recorded an episode on epistemology, and and I honestly felt talk about humility. Like, I don't even know how it's gonna come out, but I don't care because I learned a ton from him. But nice he he for I think his second appearance on my show talked about how he's gone through how many preps, right? He's gone through dozens of preps in his career. And only now, and now as in like a year ago, when he's a pro, has he finally did he finally try not to tracking? And he said, and it's he he said it only took year, it took years of doing it many different ways and honing the skill. It's exactly that. And then another guest I had on Dr. Mickey Willadin, she has the podcast Wikipedia. Love talking to her because her mindset is always about the skill and not about the thing or the result or like even what the skill is per se. And it, you know, just the fact that you need to develop skills and get into that mindset. Love it. So, having said all that, let's do that here from a fitness perspective. You know, not hey, what program do you do for your training? But what are the meta skills and how do we develop those meta skills?

Alan Lazaros 47:03

Challenge accepted. Yes. So not an easy feat, too. And for anyone out there listening, just bear with us, take notes if you can, if you're not driving. Uh, one of the skills that needs to be honed is focus. If I, and again, I I've been coaching for 10 years, I have it tracked 11,478 hours of coaching, training, and podcasting. I'm not saying that to flex, I'm saying that so you know I'm not some young kid just talking. I'm 36 years old, I look 12, I know. What I want you to know is I I this is all I do. Right? Like helping people achieve their goals is all I do. And fitness coaching was the first three years of that. So focus, if I watch you for a day, if I could have a camera on you for a day without it getting creepy, I could tell how success I could predict your success based on how well you control your focus. You want to talk about a meta-skill, scale and subskill, depending on how you look at it. Learning to control your focus is probably where I would start. If you can't stay focused, I have a hat on in the gym that's always black. I hate the ones with the underbrim that's not. I have a focus cap. Have you ever seen the focus caps that are like this? Oh yeah. Yeah, I have one of those. I was I was wearing it earlier today. Yeah, um my uh I have air pods that are noise canceling. I actually used to not wear contacts on purpose because I didn't want to see facial expressions in the gym. Now I know I'm out of my mind with all this, but I'm telling you, when I'm in the gym, I go to war. I go to war with my lesser self. Do not talk to me, do not look at me, do not come near me. Emilia and I go to the gym every day, every other day. We we exercise together every day, but we gym every other day. We don't we have sign language. People probably think we're deaf. We never talk. This means I need a spot, this means I hit a PR. But we have a bunch of others.

Philip Pape 49:02

And we need headphones or no, music or no? Music, for sure.

Alan Lazaros 49:06

So you do have music. Okay. We do have music, noise canceling, airpods. But with music, not silence. With music, not silence, yeah. Absolutely. Specific playlists, sometimes we jam together on Spotify, you can do a jam, sometimes we don't. But specific playlists that that for me, everything's fit for purpose. So, for example, after the gym, the the song by Green Day 21 Guns came on, and she's like, Hey, can we change this? This is too sad. We gotta I gotta be on a call in five minutes. I was like, Yeah, fair. So everything's fit for purpose for us. And so I always pick the workout, you know, carb up in the morning, pre-workout, perfectly timed, boom, get into the gym, awesome flow, hat down, no one talk to me. Like, let's get in the zone. I I also do the hoodie thing with the hoodie up to start, and then as you get warmer and warmer and warmer, you basically you basically strip the whole time because you're first it's a hoodie, then it's a shirt, then it's a it's a it's like a it's like a sacred practice, but focus back to the skill. That's where I would start. If you can't stay focused, you can't you can't build a great physique or a great company, you just can't.

Philip Pape 50:08

Yeah, so it's great that you mentioned focus because I feel like that ties back to the mindfulness and the flow that we were talking about earlier as well. And I know we don't have a lot of time left to get into what some of the other skills are, but I'm glad that you dropped like this is the thing to start from because now I'm reflecting on my day. If you were creepily watching me with a camera, uh I do pride myself on being able to really focus, but at the same time with social media, with the world today, with phones and notifications. And I'm often working from home with my family there, although they're super respectful and my kids are great. There's so many distractions and things like that. So I think that could be a whole other discussion about okay, the listener takes this knowledge and says, you know, what can I learn about being focused, knowing that that meta skill can translate into all the other things I'm trying to do with tracking my nutrition, with lifting weights, with having a plan, with sitting down and thinking about my future and all of those things, where would they start?

Alan Lazaros 51:07

So designing your environment for focus and then also talking to your peers. So Emilia and I don't have kids yet. We have a dog and two cats, and I know that that's not the same, but that's not what I'm saying. Everyone has distractions. Also, my phone, and and Philip, by the way, if you ever want to go deeper on this stuff, I'm happy to come back. This has been awesome. Okay. But for now, you can see there's no notifications on my phone. If you're on YouTube, you can see. Not a single badge notification, nothing. This phone will only ring for two humans. One is Kevin Palmeri, my business partner, who you know. The other one is Amelia Smith, my partner. Intimate partner. I live with her. No one right now, there's six calls that I've gotten. Half of them are probably telemarketers or something crap. So when I said there's no notifications, there's a badge notification for calls down here. I just realized that now. Um, but I'm gonna block most of those people. And first I'm gonna check my voicemail and see if any of those are legit. They're probably trying to lend me money. Um, because our company's doing very well, which I'm very grateful for. But my point is, and I know I gotta go quick here, you need to design your digital and physical environments for flow. You have to design your digital and physical environments for focus. You'll notice I got calls. Watch this. I got 218, 218, 213 yesterday, yesterday. Apparently, I got those calls yesterday. But I've had a call at 218, it's 258 now. I got I got three calls in the middle of this podcast and nothing rang. Now, there's something called emergency bypass on your iPhone. I don't have an Android, so you have to figure this out if you have an Android. You can make it so certain people can get through and other people can't. There is nothing so urgent unless it's Kevin or Amelia, because if something's burning down in the business, I need to know, and if if Amelia needs me, I need to know. But other than that, no one can get a hold of me. And now I know I'm extreme with that. I know a lot of people don't like that. Also, we have a closed door policy. So my office right now is the door is closed. Stephen Cotler says, if you can't put a sign on your door that says F off, I'm flowing, then you have a problem. Emily and I basically have house rules that say if my door is closed, it means I'm flowing. Unless it's an absolute emergency, please do not disrupt me. And then when we have children, we're gonna have to have a whole new set of house rules, which is which is a whole nother thing. But ultimately, if you design your phone and your physical environment for flow and for focus, you're gonna be far better off. And also at your gym, and this is gonna sound cruel, I know, but this is this is peak performance. Don't make friends at your gym. Don't make friends at your gym. I don't have any friends at my gym, and that's on purpose. It's by design because I don't want I'm there to work out, and I make it very clear in my energy I'm there to work out. I'm not here to talk, I am not here to socialize, I don't have a lot of time. Time is my most valuable asset. I have three businesses I have to take care of. So at the end of the day, and by the way, when I have kids, it's gonna be even worse. So at the end of the day, try your best to stay focused. There's only a few things in life that really, really, really, really, really matter a lot. And most of the rest is just superfluous stuff. Fitness is one of the things that really matter. And if you don't focus and design your life for focus, you're in some trouble. And um, I can't I say that hardcore because I care. Yeah. Because you're not gonna be in shape without that. You just need, yeah, you might not be in shape even with that. It's it's it's very challenging. Like I think it takes humility to say, I need to focus. I think it's arrogant to think you're gonna wing it and be in great shape.

Philip Pape 54:29

Sure. That's a great meta skill. And I think we're just scratching the surface on this. Honestly, I want people to reach out to you. We're gonna share your contact info. And if you're listening to this, you're like, I've got to hear the rest of this potential conversation that we haven't yet agreed on having. And you want to hear the other meta skills that direct directly relate to fitness. And I know there's a list that we didn't even get to Alan. I want you guys to reach out to Alan. If you're comfortable reaching out to me and just saying, bring Alan back on for that, do that as well. We want to test this out and talk about following up with the rest of these because it's an important conversation. And a lot of people think too much at a low level. And I think you've brought it up to

Stress, Hormones, And Mindfulness

Philip Pape 55:04

that crucial level of the meta skills. So, with that, Alan, where can folks reach out to you?

Alan Lazaros 55:09

So we have a website called nextleveluniverse.com. We've got a book club, I do masterclasses every month for free. We got all kinds, we got a group coaching program, we got all kinds of cool stuff. The podcast is Next Level University. It's 1% improvement in your pocket from anywhere on the planet completely free. And that's Kevin and I just talking about success and personal development every single day, 2,200 episodes. And really what it is is we're a coach in your pocket to keep you on point. Health, wealth, and love. And uh my Instagram is the best place to reach me. You and I have been talking on there. If you DM me on Instagram, that's gonna be me, not an AI bot, not an EA, like actually me. And uh please reach out. I check it every single day. I do Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. If you DM me on any one of those, Instagram's best, Facebook's next, and LinkedIn is third. I will get back to you eventually. Just LinkedIn expect a little delay.

Philip Pape 56:00

We're gonna keep it simple for folks, keep the IG in there. Yeah. Um, NLU Podcast, nextleveluniverse.com. My brother, it's been a pleasure. Dear listener, reach out to Alan. He's a great guy. Check out their podcast, tune in for the potential upcoming episode where we do another one of these. And uh have a great weekend, my friend. Thank you, Philip. Thank you for having me. It's been awesome.