Episode 038 – Three fundamental elements to every well rounded exercise routine or system, what is rebounding, key benefits, is it the 80/20 of exercise and more – Part 2

Harms: This is part two on a conversation on the topic of body and I want to starts off by re-quoting form part one, this quote had quite an impact on our listeners and many mentioned that it made them understand, it made them sit up and realise why the result of what we do to our body today is not actually seen today it will be seen in decades to come. 

And sadly, sometimes in a catastrophic way, so the quote that Ro pulled out was from Hippocrates and the quote goes like this, illness does not come upon us out of the blue they come about through small daily sins against nature. When enough sins have accumulated illness will suddenly appear. 

Now that’s such a powerful quote and moving onto why we chose and selected this particular subject in the relation of body and why we’re even having a part two on it and is twofold really, two reasons. 

Number one is because whilst we go through a highly vulnerable time as a human race where the reality is we are under threat under attack by a virus, therefore, myself and Ro wanted to talk into the subject of body, and as you know we bought in previous guests to about immunity and amazing subjects like that to keep you protected. 

We also want to contribute and want to equip our listeners with simple ideas in which you can adopt immediately around the area of the body. That’s number one the reality is we care. We are passionate about health and number two; the second reason is Ro has been distributing his recipes for success for years now. If you listened to episode one, you would have started to understand what these recipes are about, and within these recipes are five main ingredients, mind, body, self, relationships and money, and as a supporter of the podcast when you support from the starting tier actually which is literally £1 a month, you get the perk of receiving your weekly recipes directly into your inbox. 

What are these recipes? 

You will get a creative idea within each one of those categories to inspire change. For example in mind for that particular week you may have an inspirational statement, a creative idea that you can implement and act on immediately with family, friends, yourself within that particular week so that’s how it works. 

So to honour these amazing recipes that go out, we wanted to focus in on one of these areas in part one and part two of this episode. That part is body. 

Let me do a quick recap before I hand over and introduce Ro and in part one, in episode 34 we spoke about diet, sleep and vitality. Diet in the form of both liquid and food, and that’s everything from experiencing a clean burn to describing a super food pyramid with some examples of what to eat and drink within each category of that pyramid. 

That was amazing and should give you an insight of what to eat and what not to eat the ideal foods and the foods to maybe avoid, which will give you a food hangover and those items which almost tell you you’ve had a food hangover.

 You wake up the next day, feeling a certain way because of something you ate the previous day. The next thing we covered was sleep. Sleep is critical. We spend one third of our lives asleep, but we don’t take it that seriously considering how much time we spend asleep. We covered everything from what technology Ro uses to analyse sleep to the impact sleep has on your overall life and also some incredible must-read book recommendations which, finally, the science has now been shared with the public and those of some great book recommendations to check out. 

The final thing we spoke about was vitality. What is vitality and why is it different from energy. Ro shared with us some tactics and tools and techniques in the best way to actually observe your vitality in a given week, or a given day in order for you to be able to observe it and understand what is causing a dip in vitality and it could be that you permanently dipped in vitality, in which case you are not getting the best of yourself and your human potential. 

Finally Ro left us with a purpose statement to inspire you listeners into hopefully working on your own health purpose statement, sitting up understanding how important that quote is that we shared with you in the introduction. 

Now onto part two where we will be discussing exercise, meditation and some conclusive points for you to start deep diving on.

But before we get into this we had a couple listeners ask a handful of similar questions which I thought were interesting and it goes something like this. What if our listeners approach this and say this all seems so simple, surely it can’t be as simple as drinking clean liquid and eating clean food, is it as simple as that? 

I wanted to ask this question to you to provoke the listeners who may, and I have in the past, tend to overcomplicate the matters of body and health. So Ro over to you. 

Welcome to part two and I know what we’ve got in store for them because we really deep dived and prepared a comprehensive set of notes for them today.

Dr Ro: Thanks, Harms. 

Thank you everybody for listening to the podcast and I think this is a subject that we could stretch over many podcasts and in fact we’ve already discussed the guess that we would like to bring in, so again thank you for supporting us. For those of you that are supporters of the podcast.

Hopefully, you’re getting the benefit for the recipe for success which took some time to do, there are 260 ingredients to work on your mind, body, yourself, relationships, and money. Those of you that are supporting us at a deeper level I’m sure you’re starting to understand some of these detailed videos I’ve created around different subjects, thank you for doing that as well. We’re going to tackle part two in a slightly different way to maybe some people would, but to address that question, which is a great question by the way I wish it were that simple. 

If it were that simple I think people would do it. Most people are looking for an easy fix. I think you’ll probably agree with Harms the older generation; my generation grew up with a really old regimented approach to fitness. It was hard core circuit training the old school cross-country runs. You had a taskmaster of a schoolteacher on physical education, and it was like you do it or you get your backside slapped whatever or your knuckles rapped. 

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think today’s generation certainly your generation had it quite as disciplined from an exercise, physical exercise perspective. 

Would that be a fair observation?

Harms: I think that’s fair. It’s now, are you uncomfortable running, okay sit this one out, you don’t have to run today. If you don’t feel like running today you don’t have to worry about it. I think there is a shift in that we’ve gone to the opposite extreme.

Dr Ro: That’s an interesting point. 

I remember coming back from a school cross-country doing so many laps and I was freezing. I’ve never been a big guy. I had low body fat but I’d come back and my fingers were numb, just soaked through and you just did it. you didn’t complain, grumble, there was a level of uncomfortableness you brought an extra top, you came in everyone piled in the showers. That was it, the world in terms of physical and the exercise side of things has changed dramatically. 

That said, the technology, our awareness, our understanding of how the body works and the science behind it has gone to a completely elevated level, which is phenomenal and there’s a lot of free resources out there online you can watch. 

I would say some of them are very, very good and some of them are dangerous in the sense that it’s like everything we have to caveat even our podcast, although we’re going to give you guidance on what we do and some of the things we’ve seen working with people I’ve been privileged to bring in as guests on my previous events. We still have to caveat and say you’ve got to go and check things out. If we suggest something that you are looking to implement, if you’ve got any physical issues or anything like that seek medical advice. Get a physical trainer so we still have to caveat that.

I think the point being that there is so much information it becomes an overload and I personally believe you have to tune in and go with what feels right, so the stuff that we will talk about today that may or may not work for you, and that’s fine, but it’s about going to a shopping mall or a marketplace and choosing the things of the shelf that are right for you.

Unfortunately at the moment, there are these fads around but they come and go very quickly because of social media it flashes up and people can pay advertising behind it, and if there is enough money behind the advertisement people believe it’s real because it’s there but that doesn’t necessarily mean that’s the case. We’re going to stay general today, but we will deep dive a few areas. 

So to answer your question Harms I think in simple terms, there are six or seven things to consider. There’s diet, that’s one area that will impact your health. 

Stress factors, external stress factors, everything from relationship challenges to what’s happening around you environmentally, work.

As simple as it sounds if you’ve got kids you’ll know this, your whole world turns upside down. You just can’t manage your time in the same way, so it brings a different level of stress add to that going to work, add to that other kids, health issues, pressure from work, a business that’s failing, a career that’s struggling, relationship issues. 

You could eat really healthy but still find your body is missing functioning or going into a state of diss-ease because now at a cellular level there are chemical reactions that are fighting whatever you’re doing on a healthy level in terms of your diet. 

Massive subject in its own right by the way. Then we come to contaminants. 

We are living in a world of absolute pesticide blitz and I read a statistic that some years ago they were looking at the pesticidal contamination within the umbilical cord of babies and one report I read they’d found 200 different chemicals in the umbilical cord of the baby that had been taken in through the mother who was not somebody that ate organic food, they just ate because consumer produced, mass produced products off the shelf. 

This is coming through what they’re eating, maybe walking around the fields where there are pesticides, general fumes coming in from cars that’s a hell of a lot of pesticidal contamination in a baby that hasn’t been born yet, that’s scary in its own right. 

There was another stat of the number of pesticides that were in the milk of cows being produced on a standard farm because they were eating grass, which of course has been sprayed and has probably been fertilised from something else that has been sprayed and contaminated it is ongoing, go look into this it’s a scary thing.

Harms: That’s a good Ro, we are sharing our experiences, we’re sharing what we’ve taught in the past, Ro’s done live health events. He has brought experts into that arena to share their expert knowledge, so this is just to bring to your awareness the topics of health and the different areas in which you can deep dive, as example contaminants is one so you’d go deep dive and go learn about the topic yourself. 

Or something else may pop up that Ro may talk about that might be the one that peaks your interest and you may want to deep dive into that.

Dr Ro: Each of these is like a window into a huge area of research and we haven’t even talked about what’s going on above us. So what’s happening in the skies everything from planes, Covid all of a sudden there was a load of global statistics that came out and said categorically that the environment had shifted in those two months. 

Where flights were reduced to virtually nothing added on top of that the concept of chemtrail. whether you believe it exists or not, it is certainly a subject to go and look into and one I’ve taken time to look into over the years. This is an environmental impact on our bodies now, that is the third thing. 

Dr Ro: Just these three things alone can have an effect on your health. Water quality is a massive subject. What you drink from a tap now you’ve got to ask yourself the question, is it right for me? 

The amount of processing that has to go into tap water to get it to a pH neutral state and to make sure that it’s chemically clean for you to consume again I’m not going to go there, but I myself am uncomfortable and haven’t drunk straight tap water for probably more than a decade now. 

These are things to be aware of and as you go around the country around the world, different countries have different ways of treating water. 

For example if I’m in somewhere like Sweden I can consciously taste the quality of the water. If I happen to have a mouthful of water that comes out the tap it tastes completely different to somewhere here. 

Harms you’ve been at events with me where I’ve been speaking and somebody’s brought water up to drink and you’ve seen me take one mouthful and spat it out in the glass. When I can smell it before it comes to my nose because I can smell the chlorine in there.

Harms: You might be thinking how are we going to have clean drinking water? 

Well, there’s a flipside to that argument which is, through this cleaning process all the amazing minerals within our body are now stripped away, so you’re having water, but it is demineralised, there’s no nutrients or minerals in it. 

There’s the flipside discussion of that water cleaning process as well, and you may think how do I remineralise it?

Dr Ro: On that I’ve been contacted by someone in the last couple of weeks and they specialise in this subject, so I am hoping we can persuade them to come on and talk about the subject on our podcast which would be amazing. Food quality is another huge subject.

We actually chose to live and he’s done similar things with his lovely wife Gee, to live in an area where it’s really easy to access good quality food. When I say good quality I mean grown from the ground. 

Harms and I walked round organic farms and we were watching food that was being seeded, naturally being placed into organic ground and everything coming back off that. We tasted the food, the quality of those vegetables tasted dramatically different to something you get off the shelf in a supermarket.

Harms: Absolutely and we will be supporting listeners by sharing with you how you can offset the fact that food quality may be different in different parts of the country. But the reality is, maybe we can’t move closer to organic farms or you don’t have access to that, or the way your lifestyle is that’s fair and understandable. 

However, we will be bringing in a guest to show you how you can give yourself an insurance policy by making sure you have an offset for that food quality.

Dr Ro: When it comes to food quality, you’ve got the quality of the food meaning has it been brought out of the ground? Is it organically looked after? There’s no toxins, there’s no pesticides, and so it tastes better. 

The quality of food in terms of taste tastes better, but then you’ve got the nutritional quality of the content. Is it packed or is it picked too early stored in a dark area to prolong its life before it gets to the shelf, such that without going into statistics the amount of vitamin content is literally negligible. 

How do we do that, Harms has just mentioned it, there is a way round that. It might be that you can’t get the taste you want from the quality but we can get the supplemental input into your body and that’s what we’ll do with one of our guests coming in very shortly. Then we come to exercise. That’s another factor of how we look after our body. Most people think keeping health is just diet and exercise but if you’ve noticed between those two we’ve [00:19:00] had one, two, three, four different other areas to consider. 

The last one is just the mindset because if your emotional health is distressed, then you’ve got another stress factor. Stress factors are external to what’s going on outside you. Then there’s how you physically react to that. If you start to get anxious, overwhelmed and we all experience it. 

I’ve probably had the most pressure on me on a personal level over these last six months than I have done in a decade or two and even at my level I get to a point in my bandwidth, I refer to bandwidth, which is the amount I can physically cope with and I’ve got a pretty good capacity for that. But I’ve reached that point on a few occasions in the last few months and that without a doubt creates a chemical reaction in your body. 

If you’re very tuned into it you know how to monitor it, how to depressurise it, how to decompress from that, otherwise it builds up and it has a long-term effect. We talked about on the last podcast how a friend of mine developed cancer over 15, 16 years and some of that can be purely down to the manifestation of stress within the body. Again, research, if you do your own deep diving on this you’ll start to see the effects of this.

Harms: Ro let us start talking about exercise, which in today’s world, with the online marketing space exercise can be broken down into the tiniest categories but can we share with the listeners a go to or foundational point in which they can start to develop an exercise habit, routine, a go to, or even just an overall awareness. 

Because many people know that exercise is something i.e. walking, running, weightlifting, but they may not understand where that lives within an exercise model or an infrastructure.

Dr Ro: Let me start with the three areas of excise and structural alignment, and then I’ll just start to drill down a bit. We have aerobic exercise, anaerobic exercise and then you have structural alignment. 

That’s the simple way to look at this from a physical perspective, from an exercise perspective. As you’re listening to this depending if you’re Harms generation it may be that you are focused more on one of these, in reality and this is what I discovered as I got older and by no means am I perfect. 

So when I talk from this perspective, my goal is to find a balance between these areas, but go back to what I’ve just talked about, sometimes external influences. Things are happening around us, circumstantial changes meaning that we don’t always get that balance. 

But the objective is to get the balance across each of these.

Harms: Ro and I live near each other and through this time we’ve been safely exercising on occasion, but as Ro will know as well, since I had the new born we would be bike riding but now bike riding would fit into one of these areas Ro just described. 

But now it’s paused, so I think one of the dangers with listeners is okay you guys must nail structural, aerobic, and anaerobic all in one week. A perfect week and I don’t think that’s the case for absolutely anybody. I think the reality is the first step is to find awareness of these three elements and then just drive towards them, and if you listen to Ro’s purpose statement at the end of episode 34, part one of the body episode you would have heard a purpose statement. 

Ro is it fair to say that this is something you are constantly keeping in top of mind, so you’re working towards that? It’s never this is what happens every single day like clockwork.

Dr Ro: That is exactly right and when the cycling eased off a punchbag went up and the battle ropes came out because I thought, okay, what can I do to compensate when I’m not out cycling. That will allow me to get aerobic but also get some structure in there as well as some physical, so it’s about awareness. 

Harms has put his finger on it. 

If you’re conscious of something, then it’s not going off your radar. The minute you lose that consciousness and that’s very much what we are about here with the podcast, is bringing that to your consciousness. In theory it should stop you in the future saying I didn’t know that, because ignorance can’t be an argument now because you’ve got the awareness and it’s about leverage. 

Ultimately, if we can be that pivot point that leverages you to make a change, even a small change then we’ve done our job on the podcast. Aerobic exercise is purely the process of you raising your heart rate, increasing your breathing, pumping the oxygen around your body, and getting your cells really pushing out and working hard. It’s the running, the jumping, the process of doing aerobics or a cycle ride. 

Getting the heartbeat up to a certain level, and there is an interval but just be mindful of that. Younger people in particular tend to correct me if I’m wrong Harms, but the general philosophy when I grew up at 18 years of age, I remember getting a set of dumbbells and a bench in my bedroom. I was reading personal development and I was even back in those days I had to go order a magazine.

I ordered a book on how to do a bench press, how to do curls. Anaerobic exercise does not involve you raising your heart rate in the same way an anaerobic exercise does. I’m not breathing as intensely and stimulating as an oxygenated type of exercise. This is now an aerobics so there is less oxygen to some extent but I’m working the muscles, I’m doing a bench press, a squat and doing it to a point when the muscles reach failure and I’m tearing the muscles to build them up as an example. 

That is from my observation particularly for young men who want to get their bodies looking pumped and sculpted. So historically I’m saying historically there is a difference now, but historically younger people, particularly men, would go out and try and bulk themselves up, but then didn’t want to do the work behind aerobics. They wouldn’t go running. They wouldn’t go cycling. I think there’s a change cross training has changed that significantly. 

Even now at a gym, you see a lot of people pumping. They pump and just do a tiny bit of aerobic and would you say that’s still a philosophy in that younger generation or has that shifted a bit more Harms?

Harms: I think the philosophy has shifted i.e. the understanding that we need a combination of aerobic, anaerobic and I don’t think many people are aware of the structural. I often hear experts speak about this, but I don’t think many people are aware of that. 

People are aware of aerobic and anaerobic. Now the question is what do they do in practice? Because one thing is of course to have an awareness of this the other thing is practice. So if you did your weight session for 45 minutes how motivated or how consistently do you then tick the aerobic box? 

I do tend to be more in the aerobic category if I’ve done a bike ride or a run after 45 minutes of running. How motivated am I to come home and do squats and push-ups, and work on the anaerobic side of things. 

I think in practice it’s challenging, but in reality I think it’s shifted in my generation to the fact that they know they need to have a balance of both and I think that’s represented by some of the best athletes out there. 

The Cristiano Ronaldo, Le Bron James, who start to display how the exercise on social media, so people can see that actually they’ve got a complete balance between anaerobic and aerobic, and if I want to have a body like that and have that fitness then I need to work in these two categories.

Dr Ro: Yeah, I agree. 

What I think has been a great move in the last five to six years or more, maybe, but more recently than further out, a good friend or mine Corrie Donohue, who we had actually on the podcast recently. He started developing a system for people probably eight, nine years ago and this is what I think is a great new way of looking at health and fitness was using body weight to create the strengths. 

So now more we’re seeing people doing aerobic style exercises mixed with your own body weight so the pull ups, squats, the press ups and the TRX. TRX that became very popular I’ve got a couple. Add to that cross fit exercises so it’s less about bulky heavyweights more about using your body as its own mechanism for doing exercise and nurturing tone, strength, aerobic. I think that’s definitely been a big move, but that is also combined with and this is the third element, structural. 

Structural, think of it like this structural is from your feet upwards so the minute you place a foot and I literally mean a foot or a part of your foot on the ground you are creating a physical, now this is my engineering background you create a physical pressure or tension somewhere else in the body. 

Even the lightest pressure you place on the ground, you get an equal and opposite reaction. It’s going back to basic physics, so everything has an equal and opposite reaction. The minute you place that pressure on your foot one part of your foot goes into compression, but another part to keep that stability goes into tensions, now working on ligaments and tendons and muscles. Second foot goes down if you are perfectly balanced, if I were designing you from my engineering days we would make sure the load is transferred equally down each column, which will be your legs equally into the feet, which will be your pad footings.

 If I were doing a design for this, such that there is no imbalance of load on either side. Why would I do that if I was building you as a structure? Because that load goes equally up the two first columns which would be your shins up into your thigh bones, into your first-floor construction, which would be your hips, the second floor structure now needs to be even. Which would be your vertical backbone and the rib cage and up into the third floor now, which will be your shoulders and up into the head less pressure at the top than the bottom. 

Any slight weakness in one of those floors what happens is that load gets redistributed to keep the structure even down one side. All of a sudden the right-hand side of the building now has more load going through those joints down into the footing and the other side has less load because there is a problem in your hips.

Harms: I love that picture because I’m thinking about myself if I’ve ever had knee injury, or twisted ankle and I’m now limping or keeping the pressure off that particular load say my right leg is injured, I keep my pressure off that, then the rest of the body suffers.

You start to feel it in the back, hips, in the left knee or ankle. You feel tension along the left part of your neck, so I love that way of describing it, which hopefully encourages people to take their structure part seriously. Because one of the challenges is during the aerobic or anaerobic exercises injury can happen. 

Injury is more likely because you haven’t taken the structural part seriously.

Dr Ro: That’s right. 

I went to see a gentleman called Chris who does resilo. He has a lovely example in his office where he does his treatments and he is all about physical movement in the body. He  talks about structure of the building, but for those who don’t get that, think of it as a tent. He talks about the main and poles of the tent, then you have the fly sheet and then you have the guy ropes that go out and tension. 

So you have these muscles, which should be your guy ropes and those guy ropes, you can tighten and loosen them to get the structure to get to a level of evenness that the outside tent effectively is the ligaments in the skin, then you’ve got the structure of the temperatures and the poles. 

All of these have to be in balance and what he does with his system of working on the body is he re-addresses and rebalances that. 

What we do as we get older as you mention Harms we get injury because when we are young and I’m talking took about five,10, 15, 25, 30, even 35 maybe up to 40 a lot of pliability and plasticity and a lot of [00:33:00] flexibility, so our bodies have the ability to almost self-adjust. Those guy ropes and the size of the tent the skin, the tensions can self-adjust but the problem is there’s a point where it stops self-adjusting, we’re not lubricating it, we’re not readjusting it so it gets locked. 

Instead of looking after and maintaining it we leave it, you get to my age and you’re trying to do the adjustment now and all of a sudden something else goes. I tighten one string the other side of the tent snaps because it hasn’t been kept flexible. This whole concept of structure we completely overlooked during my generation. Yes people had been doing yoga for years, but if you came to my university back in the 80s and you went up to the viewing gallery we had a massive gym. 150 to 200 people could exercise there. 

Let me ask you who you thought we saw there, if I showed you an aerobics class do you think it was men, a mixture or mainly women?

Harms: Aerobics class will be female.

Dr Ro: Correct. There were virtually two or three guys out of 200 people, and if I said to you, a circuit training class, so lifting weights, pumping, running, sprinting, squat thrust, what do you think were the majority of people in their male or female?

Harms: My gut feel is 50-50.

Dr Ro: Okay, well today but back in those days, primarily male, it was very regimented and very military style that’s how it used to be back in the early days. Cross fit today, I think you’re right 50-50 because cross fit has replaced what used to be the old circuit training, but it is a lot more sophisticated. Yoga, what do you reckon even today.

Harms: Yoga maybe 10 females it wouldn’t have been a full class.

Dr Ro: If you are going to a class would it be mainly women or men?

Harms:Female.

Dr Ro: Exactly. 

This is the perception and now I see pretty bulky guys in a yoga class, and they’re struggling because they’ve worked their muscles to such extreme anaerobic exercise that the muscles are so tight. 

The whole concept of relaxing those guy ropes, readjusting the tension and the structure because as they get older, they become these clumpy, bulky, hardly can move tight physical states. I’m very fortunate and you’re the same. We’ve got quite a slender body. We are able to keep that movement going. 

Over the years I’ve done this balance between all of them. I’m not a massive yoga person, but I do yoga movements to try maintain and I have learnt over the years to do that. If you said to me, what would be a first default place to go for structure? 

Two things without a doubt one is yoga and there are different forms of yoga. There are relaxing forms of yoga right through to some really cool power yoga. I did personal training with an Indian yogi in Singapore about five years ago. I was in a hotel for about three weeks and there was this top guy there and I paid the money and I saw this guy and I saw him once a day. He had me doing really traditional yogic movements and when he said stretch your fingers out, it was like tiny movements in my fingers. He said that is not a stretch, just move, don’t worry about the big, physical hard movement. 

I just want you to move your fingers in such a way that every finger you place down in this move you’re feeling the stretch right from the tip of your fingers. 

Whereas I was trying to get it done. Achiever mode.

Harms: Western society, going in thinking I’ve got a half an hour yoga session let’s smash it out. And then we are out of there.

Dr Ro: That’s right.

He was like we’re going to focus on just your hands and forearms, I want to make sure that you can feel what it feels like to be in the right physical position. 

There’s two extremes. 

You’ve got that really traditional and then you’ve got the modern power version as well and there is no right or wrong, you’ve got to go with what feels right for you. But it gives you the ability to stretch, downward dog is a classic building that’s like a suspension bridge almost where you’ve got the tension on the back of the legs and it’s anchored. I used to design suspension bridges. 

The foundation of this is critical, so where your hands are placed, where your feet are placed if it’s slightly off centre more load goes down one side of the body. The other one is core stability exercises which I think are phenomenal and I don’t do enough of those. 

I do them, but not enough of them and coming through Covid it has been challenging for people because of circumstances and getting into groups to do it. I think yes you can do it at home but I think when you’re around a trainer, coach, or another group of people doing it, it tends to up your game.

Watching a video is very different to having someone coach you on and make sure you’re doing it correctly, so just be mindful of that

Harms: If you think about people who do it very well it’s probably the gymnasts because the gymnast works on the micro-movements and their complete focus is on the structure first flexibility in order for you to do those amazing moves that they do, they don’t sacrifice the structure to be able to do those moves. 

In fact, it’s strengthening the structure, the flexibility and the movement in order to do that. There are some fantastic gymnasts out there who are also hitting social media to help encourage people to focus on structure because it’s also the non-sexy part out of those three things aerobic is sexy the running, cycling. 

Anaerobic is sexy, the squats, deadlifts. Whereas structure is not that sexy because it is those sometimes-micro-movements. Although yoga is now becoming mainstream. That in-depth understanding of where each finger is placed is creating the balance in my body that flexibility that has been created is neglected. 

I think structure out of those elements is one of those which you will feel when you’re 50, 60, 70, when you can’t even touch your toes, squat. It is not because of the anaerobic it’s because the structure is so used to sitting on a chair the posture is damaged.

Dr Ro: I think if we step back and take a really spiritually introspective look at this of the three areas structure if I had to put another word around it would be about presence, so it’s a subject in its own right. 

Being present with your body without needing to push it a weight, because the minute you push a weight you’re focusing on the weight. The minute you are doing aerobics, trying to hit a certain heart rate, certain distance you’re pushing the boundaries whereas yoga is literally about placing your intention on a very specific area of your body or into a void because you’re moving into a form of meditation. 

That means time. That means pressing the pause button, slowing down and not rushing and that’s why I think you’re spot on. It is one of those areas that gets neglected in the modern world, but if we went to an eastern country or one of the countries which traditionally has always put value on that, China is a classic example you see people in the morning and they just take time, there’s no rush. 

They don’t rush to work. They take the time to do it.

Harms: Absolutely. 

I think that’s a fantastic foundation for anybody maybe new to exercise or has been exercising for many years, but you’re focused on one of these areas and you’re neglecting one of the two. I know personally, I am very much in the aerobic area, so this is a nice reminder for me. 

Ro I know there’s something incredibly cool that you’ve been sharing with your students and delegates who come to attend your live transformational events, turning point events, your health then, and on occasion small workshops, etcetera this is the kind of stuff you share with them. One of the things I know you speak about is a concept or a practice called rebounding. 

When I first learned about it through you I was not aware that that was a thing or a practice so would you mind sharing with our listeners what that is and some cool tips and tactics around that.

Dr Ro: Rebounding is not a novelty now, but when I started talking about it, it was, and I learnt it through my own study of other people doing this out there. 

I say thank you to the universe for bringing that to my attention and we’ve had rebounders now in our house for some years, it’s something that can be brought out and used on a daily basis, or at least for those of you listening on a relatively regular basis. When we went travelling, I think before I met you Harms the rebounder was part of one of the things we took with us. 

I’ve got a very dear friend of mine in his 60s now, he actually runs workshops around the world on the body. Body mechanics and how you can make slight tweaks of the muscle and it can trigger the behaviour of another part of the body. 

Amazing individual and his name is Michael Nixon-Livy. If you look at my Turning Point book and you look at the message, the testimonial on the front cover, I think that is from Michael. He literally has rebounders around the world. So when he flies into a country to where he’s running a workshop he has a rebounder there. 

When he came to visit us a couple of times my daughter was two years of age and he drove across Europe, he had a rebounder in the back of his car. He gave me the inspiration for me to start to think like that and he is a fit person for 65 now probably, and he literally catapulted me to learn this practice so I have to take my hat off to him as well. 

A rebounder is just a trampoline, these baby trampolines. I used to think they were a kids thing, but actually rebounding is a science.

When you do free weights, when you use a treadmill, when you’re going on a weight machine or a step machine, circuit training, running or doing some kind of home exercise machine at home. 

We are basically introducing three principles. 

You’re working with gravity, working against gravity. It is pulling you down and you’re moving against it so you are working the body. 

Number two you’re moving a weight. So if you’re lifting a weight you are moving a weight there. If you’re running, jogging, cycling or moving a weight horizontally for cycling up and down if you’re running. 

The third principle is that you are stressing the body physically, you’re stressing the cells to be specific, you’re actually physically moving the cells because every cell in your body any time you’re doing a movement is being stressed in compression meaning that it is being squeezed or tensioned, meaning that you’re now lifting up. 

There is one common body part in all this, and these are our cells. Every cell in our body when we’re doing exercises are either under compression, i.e. being squeezed or it’s being stretched and so our objective here is to get those cells working and want to get every little part of the body moving at a cellular level. Because it all interacts together to work in harmony right down into our gut, our intestines, everything and that includes our lymphatic system. If you look at it from this perspective, let me share something with you, let me talk about G forces. 

Now let’s put some  science behind the rebounder, so the principle behind rebounding really got catapulted when NASA was sending people off into space. When someone goes into space what’s the fundamental thing that becomes missing? 

It is gravity and our bones and muscles in every part of us, because we are on this earth we are bound by gravity. Being pulled down by a gravity pull we are working against gravity that is what keeps us strong. It allows our muscles to keep growing.

Harms: If they don’t have gravity what we’re saying is they will experience atrophy with in regards to, these cells become less and less strong. 

Less powerful, is that fair to say?

Dr Ro: Correct and that is what NASA found. For those of you listening to my generation, if you are not  going and doing anaerobic exercise, you’re not stressing your muscles and putting pressure on your structural elements of your body, you’re actually going to become weaker in so many different ways. 

Which is why you see a lot of frail older generation people because they haven’t done this, they start to become lazy and the chair has become one of the biggest dangers to all of us. Sitting down at a computer, sitting down on the toilet, sitting down to have dinner, sitting down to travel somewhere now. 

We never used to do that. We would run, walk, stretch, pick fruit from trees and keep our upper body stretched. We would squat down to pick things up, if you go to India and Africa, Asia, for example, or even into places like the Middle East when you go to a bus stop people are squatted down. 

Most people can’t squat with their feet flat now because our bodies have become lazy. I brought a specialist in who just taught one of our events how to properly squat to get your body re-engaged, right down to the core of your base of your spine. 

So what NASA discovered by setting people into the space exactly what you said the astronaut atrophied. Atrophy is where the muscles are not working, they start to waste away because there is no gravity pull on them. 

When you are bouncing on a rebounder, a general bounce creates 1.25 times gravity at the bottom of the bounce, you’re adding 25% of the gravitational force on the body, which means your body now can work harder at the bottom of the bounce. The G force is up to 3.5 to 4 times G when a softened movement occurred. 

So when somebody starts to bounce on a consistent basis it’s creating this really great pressure on the body. But unlike a treadmill or if I’m running what that they found was that when they brought people back from space and they put them onto treadmills and they started to get the fitness levels up because they’ve atrophied their muscles were wasting. They were getting injuries, stress, repetition of one or a better word. 

They had to find something different and they explored and they discovered that the concept of using trampolines and then down to small trampolines if they did the exercise right, they could glide up and down but still get the muscles, the structure, the cells experiencing an accelerated G, which accelerated their physical recovery. 

I’ll read a quote from NASA.

“The external work output at equivalent levels of oxygen uptake was significantly greater, while trampolining than running.” 

Not only did they find it had a physical benefit in terms of helping the muscles and the structure of the body start to strengthen without the impact, they also started to find that the oxygen take-up by trampolining was significantly greater than running. 

So now you can benefit from anaerobic and aerobic benefits. 

“The greatest difference was about 68%. This makes it possible to exercise the entire body, knowing that there is no undue pressure applied to any part of the body such as the feet, the ankles and the legs because of the soft action and at the same time knowing that each part of the body, is receiving the necessary environmental stresses, it needs to become stronger cell by cell.” 

How powerful is that man.

Harms: The greatest difference was about 60% is massive and so I’m watching this looking at Amazon at what’s the best rebounder out in the market. It’s going back to the principle that I love which is the 8020 principle which is when health is being discussed, or when nutrition is being discussed it’s almost how can we get the best bang for our buck? 

I’m talking about time here because at the end of the day, we do have jobs, business, new born babies. We’ve got house renovations. We’ve got all of this stuff which happens around us. How can we keep health simple but get the maximum benefit from being sensible and being really smart about what we actually do. 

What Ro is describing here through rebounding is exactly that, being extremely smart or how NASA describes 68% smarter.

Dr Ro: I need to caveat this and Harms has picked up on a very important point. You get the wrong rebounder and actually, you can injure yourself. 

When I used to run live events we would demonstrate this, I’d bring a poor cheap quality rebounder versus a more expensive one, and demonstrate it and let people actually feel it for themselves. A gym subscription these days is 40, 45, maybe £50 a month and a cheap end of the rebounder market is maybe 35 to 40. 

Whereas if you pay double that or a little bit more you’re paying in excess of potentially £200, which maybe is three months of gym membership, but now you’ve got a really cool rebounder. What were some of the findings, not just from NASA but generally studies done on this? Here are the principles and the key physical benefits. 

Number one the whole body gets exercised at a cellular level. If you watch someone on a rebounder you see their face moving up and down, and there are exercises we used to demonstrate where if you are rebounding, you can actually tense the face. You can create tension in the face whilst rebounding so now you get a resistance to the rebound. Or you can simply let your face be loose and allow the muscles to be stretched and the cells to be stretched, so every single cell is involved in the exercise. 

Whereas if I do a bicep curl what I’m really working on is my arms, possibly some shoulder, back and maybe some of my core, but unlikely above that my neck and my face is being exercised. Maybe a bit of my legs, but the main focus is actually on the muscle group, whereas when you’re rebounding everything is being worked because it’s involved in the movement up and down. 

There are 75 trillion cells in your body expanding and contracting all at the same time when you move to the bottom of the travel they’re compressing, they’re contracting. When you go up into the air and start to reach the peak at the top it goes from contraction to expansion every single cell. 

I can’t have a cell in my forearm suddenly disappear when I’m in the middle of an exercise. It’s either being compressed or contracted. It increases the way of gravity. Every single cell somewhere between 60-100 times a minute, you’re getting accelerated exercises which is what NASA found to get these astronauts back into a strong physical state quickly. It was a rapid way of doing it and if it can work for an astronaut it can work for us on a daily basis. 

It strengthens all muscles, internal and skeletal, so everything that’s going on in your stomach. Think about the organs and everything going on internally. Then you move onto the muscles holding the skeleton together right to the head, everything is being moved. 

It is isometric and isotonic, so you’ve either got isotonic which is basically the concept of moving a dumbbell press or a dumbbell curl where you’re moving your muscle up and down and it’s compressing the muscle, you’re stretching it. 

On a rebounder you can take a small weight depending on your body strength and as you’re rebounding I can do curls. I can actually move up and down and imagine what happens when I get to the bottom of the run and I’m bouncing up if I’m doing a curl, now I’m accelerating G on the weights increasing it by one, two times depending on how much weight and movement I’m doing. I can actually have the same feeling on the muscles as if I’m doing a curl or isometric which is where you can simply hold the dumbbell in the same fixed position. 

Or I remember being in Spain we took no weights with this, we were living in  Spain for about 10 months and I had a rebounder there and I used to bounce up and down with my fists clenched, as though I was doing a dumbbell curl. What happens now is the tension is on the muscle, it is isometric, so it builds a different type of strength into the muscle.100 times a minute, phenomenal. I’m not physically moving, I’m just going up and down the G doing work for me.

Harms: It is extremely simple, but also, it is also counterintuitive because again when we went to that poor question at the start, which isn’t this simple? 

I think when people do complicate it, it is running. What about the bicep curls, dumbbells, what about the gym membership?

 This is a form of complexity in the sense that you’re learning something new, but it’s extremely simple because we are talking about a micro or mini trampoline.

Dr Ro: I remember years ago we first demonstrated that I had fairly strong guys and they said what about sit ups? 

So you lie on the rebounder with your bum down and you go into a slight bend like a banana, you put the tension as though you’re doing an exercise for a sit up, but it’s like a core stability exercise. 

Now you gently and I mean freaking gently just rock up and down, just tension and relax your buttocks and that movement up and down immediately transfers to your stomach. You do that, 30 or 40 times that’s like 30 or 40 sit ups and people were burning out completely. 

There are some really clever, subtle things you can do to isolate a muscle group, same thing with squats. I challenge anyone to stand on a rebounder in a squat position and then slowly bounce up and down, because what you’re effectively doing is putting G force through your buttocks and you’re going up and down 30,40, 50, 60 times a minute. Your bum just gets burnt out really quickly it’s phenomenal. It targets muscle groups if you want it to do that.

It increases flexibility, it burns calories. 

This is what NASA found it burns calories, 11 times faster than walking, five times faster than swimming and three times faster than running. You can burn three times as many calories by doing 10 to 30 minutes a day. I got to a point where it was just there, you were at an event with me about three, four years ago we had it in the back of the room. 

On the health events we used to have three or four around the room, now if you’re in an office if you jump on that rebounder for five minutes and get off it every cell is vibrating, it’s the craziest thing. It literally changes your energetic state because what you’ve done for five minutes you’ve done 300 every cell is just in a totally different vibrational state. You feel pumped, your brain feels stimulated, your brain cells have been moving as well.

Where you’ve got to be mindful is if you’ve got any physical limitations i.e. you might have an injury or possibly a joint challenge or something with your feet, for example, that’s not to say you can’t do it, but this is where you might take a bit of guidance. Because most people think rebounding is about jumping up and down. 

Actually, it doesn’t have to be like that. Let me talk about the benefits that have been shown from rebounding. 

Detoxification I personally think is singularly one of the most important things. You have the blood system which is pumped by the heart. 

That’s what basically moves the oxygen around the body. We have this amazing thing we call the heart and that is constantly going all the time, where the body struggles is to remove toxicity. The blood system does do that to some extent. We’ve got the urinary tract. We’ve got the liver, kidney, everything is working in harmony together but what most people aren’t aware of is the lymphatic system, which sits all the way around our body and it only works by physical movement. 

It doesn’t have a pump, it needs the body to move. The tension in the muscles around the body that contract and relax they put pressure along with gravity onto this set of tubes called the lymphatic system and those tubes get tightened, squeezed around and then relaxed. The same way you might hold a hose that has no water coming through it but has water in it. I squeeze the hose you will see a bit of water coming out the hose, if I relax the hose some of the water at the other end of the hose gets pulled down a little bit if I squeeze the hose again even though there’s no tap on you’ll see a bit more. 

That’s kind of how the lymphatic system works. It needs physical movement to squeeze and contract and pull toxicity through the lymphatic nodes and then it actually does disperse it out into the blood system and it allows certain toxins to get out. 

A good walk in the morning will certainly help, but if you want to accelerate things and get the other benefits if you take a glass of water in the morning and ideally alkalised it, then you went on a rebounder or a run or walk, but let’s say the rebounder that 60 to 100 bounces per minute I would say 80 to 90% of the time, if not more, you will find yourself going to the toilet after rebounding sessions.

It will be number one or number two because your body will be saying thank you so much, you’ve moved me. I’ve been lying down all night, there is this great movement. Gravity is working. Anything that was maybe blocked up a little bit, or you hadn’t had enough hydration now the body is being moved, the cells are being moved, the muscles and just organs are being moved. The major colon is where they start to move through then it starts to release.

Harms: How you would see this benefit is you have an increased vitality the next day or if you do this consistently your body is staying clear of toxins on a regular basis so you feel more vital. 

You have a greater energy throughout the day, you start to become your best self. 

Although we are describing some of the health benefits, some of the benefits that happen to your organs and your systems internally the true benefit that we will start to feel Ro is the fact that we feel vitality. We have a better standard of life, we wake up and we’re more alert. We have a higher concentration, these are all the kinds of things that somebody will actually experience by detoxification via this method.

Dr Ro: People take drugs to get a buzz, if you rebound you get a buzz and you clear out so you’re emptying your body out of toxins which may have taken hydration behind that. You’re flushing out your pipe system now putting a clean lean burn in there and you’re feeling better. It improves bowel movement, stimulates the internal organs, thyroids, adrenals, it increases oxygen flow to the brain and all the major organs.

Oddly enough and this is a benefit that I started to notice and good for kids it improves your balance, your rhythm and your dexterity. Now you’re putting the load down to your feet. It’s teaching you to get that balance. It’s allowing the different parts of the body to balance out instead of you putting weight on one side.

It is hard to cheat a rebounder when you land, you have to land evenly. Otherwise you’re going to bounce off to one side and I’ve done that. I’ve tested it and tried to put weight on one side but that tends to throw you off. It pushes you off the rebounder and it can be used anywhere. 

Get it at home you start bouncing, if you get a folding one you can take it with you. It really is a bloody cool tool.

Harms: What kind of types are there on the market that somebody can look into?

Dr Ro: There are three types, elastic, which is the preferred for me, which is essentially the quietest one, and then you go through to the spring which is a physically mechanical metal spring action which is your typical big trampoline. Then you get a folding rebounder which is typically a spring rebounder. 

The elasticated is the most expensive. The cheapest will be the spring and the folding spring will be somewhere between an elastic and a standard spring. What’s a typical price range? I use a German brand myself, the elastic rebounders will ranger somewhere between £200-£250 plus you can get cheaper. I wouldn’t go for the most expensive. 

I do happen to have the most expensive one from the company I use, but that’s because we went for a stainless steel slightly bigger diameter and we were travelling a lot with it, so I made that call on it. But for most of what you do you don’t need to spend that much money. The benefit here is that you’re working with an elastic, which is very even and very quiet so as you bounce, you don’t get that loud spring sound that you can get not always, but you can generally get from a spring one and the action is a lot smoother. 

You just notice it, it feels more even under foot. I had twos of spring depending on your body size, so you and I would use a slightly lighter weight elastic whereas someone who is twice our size can still use the rebounder, but buy a slightly stronger elastic. 

It can be modified according to your body weight which is why the benefits of these are so good but you are paying more. If you want to get into this to start with that might not be the best place to go unless you’ve got enough funds to do that, the next price point would be a folding spring one. Our folding spring one went missing when we did our travels. The diameter of these things are between 100-120cm for an elastic one, for your typical spring or folding spring you’re looking at 90-100 cm. 

The elastic ones don’t have the flexibility of a folding one in that you can close it down, you have to leave it up and typically the elastic ones come with legs that screw in and they have to stay up. You’ve got to find a place to place them. 

Folding ones allow you to fold them in half and put it away, take it and put it back up again. The legs also fold flat, so it pulls out clicks into place boom and what you’ve got is something that can tuck away nicely. Those are the two types that I’ve traditionally used. Folding ones I would be not paying anything less than hundred pounds personally. 

Spring ones are typically anywhere from about £30 or £40 to £300 plus I would say to get you into a reasonably good tapered spring rebounder you’re looking at £85 to £200 that should get you a tapered spring rebounder, and again about 90-100 cm diameter. There are two types of spring. The cheaper models have a non-tapered spring in them, which means they are all the same diameter spring and the problem with that is when you stretch it and then it closes, it comes to the end of it’s travel the spring just shuts. 

It stretches and then snaps and unfortunately that snapping sound creates an energetic block. It’s like you and I jumping up on a hard floor.

Harms: Like a spring bed, if you jumped on the spring mattress and it’s so noisy.

Dr Ro: Correct, and it’s not just the noise it’s the fact the energy has no way of tapering itself out, so it comes to a stop. Tapered springs have been designed to allow the energetic transfer between going down and back up again to soften the blow, they’re somewhere between an elastic and a completely normal spring and they work. 

They’re quieter but they also taper the energetic flow. The curve is more sinusoid in the way the energy flows from down to up so it’s worth paying the extra money to get a rebounder that has tapered springs and you don’t have that snapping action. 

A lot of people in the early days that bought cheap rebounders found themselves with long-term knee injuries. It was okay for the first couple of months but because they were going up and down 100 times a minute and the little snapping action of the springs, it was having an impact tiny little micro shocks into the knees and again, go do your research. But that’s what we found speaking to a lot of people in the industry they will agree the same thing.

Harms: It is just a case of investing, giving it a go, trying it out and starting to see if you start to see those benefits personally for yourself and how it compares to maybe exercises that you’re bored of.

Dr Ro: It is fun. 

That’s the thing to remember and just on the note with the springs the tapered springs are nearly always longer because it’s about the dissipation of energy. So yes, you might have saved yourself £30,£40 but in my experience I know people that have had them in the past and when they went over to the elastic or the tapered it was a significant difference. It is about consistency as well, so 10, 15 minutes at a time, even five minutes to start with and doing it two, three times a day or two sets of 10 minutes.

Harms: It will be like any exercise when you first start to run after never running before or after a big gap you’re running 10 minutes and you’re like I’m done. It will increase over time.

Dr Ro: On YouTube you’ll see some cracking examples of how to use them. Don’t think jumping, don’t think classic trampoline jumping starts with a heel to toe. jog, which is where you basically go up and down, alternating between heel and toe on each foot. You’re almost not leaving the rebounder at all there is almost constant pressure. You’re rocking so that as you come to the top of your lift and you come back down again your toe is still just on the rebounder, then you come back down again and it’s heel, flat, toe, it will feel natural. 

That’s like a walking action. You can then lift your legs so then you start to lift one leg off the rebounder and you put your weight on the other one and alternate that. That is a little bit like a light jog, but again not jogging just adjusting movement and that works really well. 

There are so many things you can do, you can do a really simple one, which is a heel and toe you put your hands in a press position above your shoulders so your arms are going at 90° to your body, and then your forearms are going vertically up and clench your fist and just bounce up and down like you’re holdings weights. If you [01:19:00] did that heel and toe for 10 minutes your shoulders will feel like they’re burning.

Harms: I love that description and what I’m really pleased about is I know that you know this because you’ve worked with experts in the space and you’ve also experienced using a rebounder and having come to your house, it’s not quite a rebounder it is a 10x rebounder. It is amazing. 

When I jumped on it with the kids they are just so used to it in the sense that they’re spending half an hour at a go, 45 minutes and they’re like come play on the trampoline. It’s a super elastic amazing trampoline which is just a larger version of a rebounder and I’m five minutes on it and I’m like I need a break now, I can’t keep up with you guys.

Dr Ro: If you’re a parent, you know this. Harms is referring now to a spring free trampoline this is an Australian design that we have in the garden. 

Yes, it’s not the same number of repetitions you might have on a rebounder, but is still an opportunity for the kids to actually play and do exercise at the same time.

Harms: Here is some context I run, I was climbing at the time we were cycling, but even then, when I went on to the spring free trampoline I felt it within five minutes. It was a different feeling of energy and exertion required and I felt great, but within five minutes I felt I had been working out for 30 minutes.

I think this is for the listeners a definite go to, especially when we don’t know if there’s going to be another lockdown. We don’t know how comfortable people are going to be with the gym, or some of those free park exercises. 

If you are not comfortable doing that or you feel slightly reserved about doing it at the moment or you want a way for your children or teenagers to exercise in a safe environment one of these just lives in your house and that’s another way to think about trying this differently. 

It is really hard to go for a run now and it’s really hard to go to the parks exercise equipment gyms as a lot of them are taped off. 

Thank you Ro, for diving deep about that. 

This kind of information typically Ro only shares age with his live audiences. That’s the reality of it, you would be there, you would have an expert demonstrate it. But the reality is, I think it’s useful you share this with them and I think the listeners will be saying thank you, because that’s normally shared within private closed doors. 

As hosts of the podcast we are always conscious when we talk about things to do with health so I do implore you to go and start to explore this yourself. When you go into this don’t just do one] leg hopping and try to do a backflip, take iit easy.

Dr Ro: I think for me it’s really just a quick re visit to what we talked about previously, so think about reducing some of the processed foods may be looking at things that involve sugar, maybe dairy, meat again we’re not trying to get you to be non meat eaters, but just think about what you take into your body and play with your body. 

The body gives you the best signs. 

Look at increasing water intake, live foods, alkalising and start thinking about your structural, aerobic and anaerobic exercise that you are doing and ask yourself what am I not doing enough of and how can I improve that? 

Even if you just go and do some basic body movements and get some guidance online or go watch the video series I created, get a rebounder. I think that is a great place to start.

Harms: From myself, I would say Ro has described this in detail, so hopefully by now I would say, sometimes with exercise it can feel like it’s tough so hopefully by us introducing the concept of a rebounder both me and Ro have used one. 

He shared it privately in detail with his live events and the audiences and also shared that with you here as a listener. I would say go try one even if your budget is low, you can always try with a spring one and then upgrade the moment you know that this is amazing and I am making this as part of my exercise routine. 

That’s myself and Ro signing out from this episode of the podcast. We look forward to seeing you on part three, where we will finalise this three-part series talking about the body. The body is one of the five recipes that you see as part of your emails for becoming a supporter from just £1 a month.

Go show us some love and we will continue to put these amazing content pieces out into the world. So, until part three, we shall be discussing meditation and some closing notes, including the eight columns of health for you in your own time to go and deep dive. We shall see you in part three in the next episode.