13 Important Lessons for Sustainable Health & Fitness Success | Dean Pohlman | Better Man Podcast Ep. 101

Hey guys, it’s Dean. Welcome back to the Better Man podcast. We took a three month break for summer 2024, and we are back with a brand new format of episodes for the next few months. So I’m excited to announce that this next round of podcasts that we do our member interviews focused on reclaiming your fitness. So these conversations are going to focus on understanding the health and wellness journeys of men as we ages, of all ages, as we age.

So all of these episodes have a pretty specific format. We’re going to talk about what made these guys realize, what made them realize that it was time for a change. I call this their oh shit moment. We also talk about how did they get started with making that change, what what helped them make the decision? What also enabled them to be consistent and stick with it when things got tough?

What was their motivation? We talk about the results that they noticed and how this encouraged them to stick with it, and how quickly these results happen. For most people, they were within the first month, usually within a couple of weeks. And then we talk about how building this habit of consistent exercise also led to other areas of improvement in their health and wellness.

Looking more at nutrition, starting to walk more, maybe getting into some other forms of exercise. We also talk about the strategies and the mindsets that they utilized along the way, and a lot of the character development that they went through as a result of these changes. We talked about simple tweaks versus overhauling their entire lives, which is a big one.

So instead of creating these massive changes that were difficult to sustain, just making little tweaks here and there and doing that over time, and then we finish off with my standard rapid fire questions. And there are some truly fantastic answers in here. In this episode, I’m going to be giving you a sneak preview of what’s to come by highlighting 13 of the most important themes that I noticed throughout these interviews that I’ve done so far.

There were many more themes than that, but these are the ones that I chose based on the fact that probably they were mentioned by 75% or more of the people that I interviewed. So these are consistent themes that come up over and over again. And hopefully this gives you guys some some of your own ideas or some inspiration, some motivation for those of you who are working on your health and wellness journey, this is a process.

This is not a quick fix. This doesn’t happen immediately. We have ups and downs. We fall off the wagon. We get back on the week. We get back on the wagon. We have periods where we’re not motivated. We have periods where we’re doing more yoga, and sometimes we’re doing less yoga and more of other exercises. So I want to give you guys some authentic stories that we’re hearing about from within the mental yoga community.

I also want to say that this is not meant to be a promotion of mantle yoga. I am asking these questions in a way to help understand their health journeys in general. Some of that is mantle yoga, but a lot of this gets into other things like nutrition, resistance training, walking, approaching the way that they think about their health and wellness differently.

So these are things that are universal that don’t just have to do with man for yoga. So, let’s get into it. So 13 themes that I recognized when going through these interviews. The first one is slow, deliberate change over time. So this came up over and over again. But the people who are successful recognize that this is not a quick fix.

This is something that they plan on doing for the rest of their life. It’s a lifestyle change, not a temporary solution. And so the way that they do this successfully is by slowly adding in changes. It’s slow, deliberate change over time. They’re not doing five things at once. They’re just doing one thing and then they’re building from there.

So that’s number one. The second thing that I noticed was this firm decision to commit. These guys weren’t kind of wishy washy with whether or not they were going to stick with a workout program or not. They decided that this is what that this is what they wanted to do, and they were going to do it. So they made a firm decision to say, I am going to do this, and I’m going to do I’m going to do this X times per week.

I’m going to stick with it. And for most people, as long as they get to that first month and they’re recognizing the benefits that encourages them to keep going. So they make a firm decision to commit. They realize that their work is paying off, usually within the first month and sometimes within a couple of weeks. Most of these guys, it was within a couple of weeks of there was noticeable improvement.

And then they then they do it. And then that enables it to stay longer. But it starts with this firm decision to commit. Third thing I notice is working out first thing in the morning. There are so many guys who talked about the importance of working out in the morning of of getting it out of the way. That’s not the right way to say it, but of of doing it in the morning so that nothing else gets in the way.

A lot of these guys are dads. All of these guys, most of these guys have jobs, or they started doing this when they had jobs. And so for them, they needed to do it in the morning to ensure that nothing else got in the way. Family stuff come up. Maybe something unexpected comes up at work, maybe something else.

But the point is that they did these things, in the morning and it’s actually inspired me significantly. So, prior to two weeks ago, I didn’t really have a morning routine. First thing when I woke up, I would go for a walk later on, maybe an hour or so after I woke up. But I was also really frustrated with that because I would wake up and I would go straight to taking care of the kids.

Didn’t have any time to myself, and that didn’t really put me in a good mental state or a good emotional state. So now I’m waking up, around 6 a.m.. I’m getting out of bed, then I’m getting in some stretching for myself. It’s not intense. It’s not crazy. It’s just this light stretching where I get to breathe, where I get to be by myself in silence.

And it’s made a huge improvement to my day. I will say, in order to do that, I’ve had to be more diligent about going to bed earlier. So for me, that just means making sure that I’m not watching screens after 9 p.m.. So if my wife’s watching TV even before then, I’ll put on blue light blocker and glasses.

So I’m not having blue light hitting me. I’m not on my phone, I’m walking around the house, maybe cleaning up, brushing my teeth, doing my gratitude practice, my end of the night meditation, and then I’m able to get to bed by ten, which, has enabled me to wake up early in the morning. The fourth thing is having a why, and this is really important.

I talk about this a lot, but this year Y is a deeply personal, meaningful reason for wanting to do something. And usually this happens in response to a meaningful personal experience. This is what gives you the motivation or the desire to change. And for most of the guys that I spoke with, they did have this very significant event that caused them to realize and have their oh shit moment.

Right? And they realized, oh, I need to do something about this or it’s not going to turn out well for me. So some of these things were health related. Maybe you had a scary doctor visit. Maybe you realize you were gaining a lot of weight. For some people it could be not having a happy home life. One of our guys mentions that he was noticing that him and his wife were drifting.

It could be wanting to be better for your family. That was a big one. We also had one guy who talked about losing a friend to suicide and that being the motivation for him. So most of these people had a, some, some sort of impetus, right? Some sort of significant personal experience that led them, to having a, led them to making the decision to make the change and then remembering that as their why.

And that actually brings me to my fifth point here, which is using your why for motivation. This is what enabled them to keep going when things were difficult. So when you are first starting something new, especially within that first month, that change is difficult. Maybe you’re working up early, you’re waking up early, maybe you just don’t have energy.

Maybe you didn’t sleep well. And there’s there’s got to be something that enables you to have the motivation to do the thing that you’ve decided to do, even when you don’t want to do it. This is crucial. And so for most these guys, they have a very clear idea of their why. They have a clear idea of their reasoning of why this change, this life change is important to them, why they need to stick with a workout program.

And remembering this is what enables them to be consistent for that first month. That first month is really difficult. That’s when it’s hard because you haven’t created the habit yet. It takes a lot of willpower and you also maybe haven’t noticed the benefits yet. So if you can get through that first month using your why for motivation, you’ll usually get to that point where you notice the benefits of what you’re doing, and that is what enables you to be consistent.

But you have to have that. Why? For motivation at the start. The next thing that I noticed, and this was actually just from one guy, but I really liked what he said and the quote he said the consequences outweighed the benefits. It was time for a change. So this was from this guy named Lee. He’s a wildlife photographer.

Interesting guy, kind of an atypical customer for man for yoga and what he means by this is the relative ease of an unhealthy lifestyle. So, you know, eating whatever he wanted, not forcing himself to exercise or do healthy things he didn’t want to want to do. Eventually, the benefits of that ease were outweighed by the negative consequences of being unhealthy, being overweight, feeling like crap, being scared for long term health does so for him.

The consequences outweigh the benefits, and you might not be at that point yet. But for some people, maybe you do get to that point. You realize, okay, like this is easy, but now the consequences are outweighed by the benefits. So, yeah, so I really like that one. So I mentioned that here. Moving on. So the first the next thing is, the after the first month, it’s the results that encourage motivation.

So this is important. And I’ve talked about this throughout this episode so far. But what enables people to keep going is results. So it’s easy to imagine yourself doing. It’s easier I’ll say it’s easier to imagine yourself doing something for one month compared to, say, doing it for one year. But what enables people to be consistent after the first month is that by that point, they’ve experienced some sort of results, and I’ll give you an example of some of the results.

One guy, this is a really cool story. He’s our first story, actually. This is a guy who’s overweight, having trouble getting an erection. He did one month of these sexual wellness workouts that we have on YouTube, and within one month, he was able to perform spontaneously multiple times in the same week. And he said that he hadn’t been able to do that in years.

He also lost 5 to 6 pounds in the process without making any other changes. We had another guy talk about, pain relief works. We had a lot of people talk about pain relief. But most of these people, when it comes to pain relief, they mentioned that it happened within two weeks. And if you spend a lot of your time in pain, if you’ve been in pain for years or decades, when all of a sudden you don’t have the drag of pain on your energy, that’s really motivating.

And then once you get past that first month and in you experience, you’re experiencing the results, right? That could be pain relief. Maybe it’s better energy. Better sleep could be improved sexual function. As we mentioned. But once you get through that, then there are going to be noticeable improvements in strength and flexibility and performance in the workouts.

And that happens usually 2 to 3 months in. But the reason why people are able to make it to this period, to get to that three month mark is because they saw results in those first few weeks, and that’s when the and after that, within at that three month point, that’s when the results really start to pile on.

You start losing weight, you start building muscle, you’re looking physically better in the mirror and you’re like, oh my, you know, this is working. I’m definitely going to keep this up. But that all goes back to getting some results within the first month, which encourages you to keep going, which gives you that motivation, gives you the proof that it’s working.

All right. That’s enough. They’re moving on to the next thing. Having a plan is incredibly important. So planning in advance, following a program, knowing that you have a blueprint gives you faith in what you’re doing. That’s one part of this. Other part of it is this is one thing that came up and this might be related to you, but a lot of guys were guilty if they weren’t doing something on a particular day.

And when they didn’t have a plan, they would feel guilty if they weren’t working out at all. But when they had a plan and they knew that the rest day was part of that plan, they realized that they were still doing the right thing. That just today was the rest day, and they would be doing a workout later.

So, having the plan not only helps with, you know, giving yourself, giving yourself a clear path to follow, being able to devote your energy to the workouts themselves rather than the training planning process. But it also helps you feel good when you do have days when you’re not doing as much so you don’t feel guilty about taking the day off.

So I thought that was important. Another big theme was reframing fitness as essential instead of selfish or maybe better explained. Reframing fitness as bettering yourself for the people around you rather than selfish. And this is something that a lot of people struggle with. They think that taking time for their selves to work out is selfish, because they’re not spending that time working.

They’re not spending their time with their family, not spending that time contributing somehow. But in reality, you are contributing. When you’re doing that. You are making yourself better for the people around you. You’re making yourself into a better mood so that you can be more present so that you can be, you know, more enjoyable to be with for the people around you.

You’re being a better worker by being able to manage your, your stress. Being able to improve your focus. And you’re also taking care of yourself, right, so that you’re not going to have as many health problems later on as you get older, which is going to follow the people around you to take care of you when that happens.

So making the shift from recognizing that, going from this place where you see fitness as or taking time for yourself is selfish, and then going to a place where you realize, oh, no, this isn’t selfish. This is something that’s going to make me better for everybody else is an important shift to go through. So another thing was substitutes and small changes instead of complete overhauls.

I know I alluded to this earlier, but the way that people saw success wasn’t by making these massive changes to their lives overnight. What they did was they substituted one thing for another, or they gave themselves little guidelines to behave by. So a nutrition example, one guy, Anthony O’Leary, is a guy who’s lost, I think I want to say close to 100 pounds, if not more than that.

But for him, he didn’t stop eating the foods that he liked entirely. He just gave himself some guidelines. He knows. No longer gorging himself at 11 p.m. he was also managing his portion controls. But you know, he’s still eating the foods that we would consider unhealthy, but he’s just doing them in a way that isn’t going to harm himself.

We also talked about people just doing one new type of exercise at a time. So instead of, you know, going from not exercising at all to saying, oh, I’m going to do yoga on Monday, cardio on Tuesday and weightlifting on Wednesday, they just did one form of exercise and it didn’t. It didn’t have to be every day. A lot of these people started with just 2 or 3 times per week.

Some people did do 5 or 6 days per week, but a lot of people also did 2 or 3 days per week, and that was enough to get the ball rolling for them. So just small changes, not complete overhauls. And that is what enabled this long term sustainable change. Rather than going through this 2 or 3 week period where you’re trying to do all these things, but then give up because it’s overwhelming, the next thing this is number 11, by the way, is tracking things.

So tracking your workouts, tracking your food intakes, keeping track of what happens to your body when you eat certain foods. So just tracking the process, just kind of, you know, you can think about this as as being a scientist and observing yourself. You know, this is this is a very this is a very popular concept in all of self development and also in, in it’s a core part of meditation, but it’s the idea of looking at yourself as an observer and thinking, oh that’s interesting.

Right. And then from there you’re able to recognize patterns. You’re able to say, oh, looks like this food isn’t good for me. So I’m I’m not going to do that. Or you’re tracking your workouts and saying, oh, I did this workout this week. I’m going to do this workout next week to, you know, whatever that is. But tracking things can be very helpful.

Number 12, community is helpful, but you need to be able to rely on yourself. And this is I ask people about how community has been helpful. And most people say that community is real has really been helpful for when they stumble, when they need support, when they need reassurance, when they need the recognition that the same thing that they’re going through is also being experienced by other people.

So realizing that they’re not alone in their struggles community has been very helpful for that. But when it comes to doing your workouts, you need to be able to rely on yourself to do them. And you could do that in the form of planning your workouts. It could be in the form of accountability emails. It could be, you know, adding workouts to your calendar.

But the point is that you need to be able to rely on yourself to do the majority of your workouts. That’s not to say that having a workout buddy isn’t helpful, but that can’t be the default. You need to be able to do your workouts on your own. And again, a lot of that goes back to some of what we talked about earlier before, right?

Planning your workouts in advance, understanding what your why is, having strong clarity around your motivation for wanting to work out, wanting to make changes. So you need to be able to rely on yourself. And that was a recognition that a lot of these guys went through. And then the 13th thing that I’ll mention, this is the last thing for long term sustainability shifting from negative to more positive self-talk.

So when guys are first getting started, when they’re getting through that first month, we’re kind of used to negative self-talk. We’re kind of used to shaming ourselves or guilting ourselves into doing our workouts, right. There’s this kind of this come on fatty, go do your workout or come on lazy, go do your workout or come on you. You pose like, let’s let’s go do our workout, right?

And for a lot of people, that’s what happens when you get started. I’m not saying that’s good, but if that’s what it takes initially, then hey, that’s what it takes initially. But over time this talk, the self-talk changes to more positive being kinder to yourself, recognizing that instead of having to work out, you get to workout. Also recognizing that you feel better when you do the workouts.

So it’s not so much about guilting yourself in to do the workouts because you need to do it because you’re overweight or you’re, you know, you feel shame about your lack of fitness or your long term health or whatever that is. But now you’re looking forward to your workout because you know it makes you feel better in the moment, right as you’re doing it.

And afterwards you’re going to feel better about yourself. But for long term sustainability, there is this shift from using negative self-talk to guilt, shame, or negatively motivate yourself to do your workouts. And it moves into more positive self-talk, which creates, you know, which creates this motivation that is based around gratitude or motivation that is based around looking forward to the benefits, right?

The intrinsic motivation of the workout itself and what you experience as a result of that. So that was, another big point. All right. So that’s what I wanted to share with you today. 13 themes that I observed in this first round of number of interviews that I did for this next season of the Better Man podcast. And again, the theme of this month, of these episodes is reclaiming your fitness.

Starting with what? Realize what? What made these guys realize it was time for a change? Their oh shit moment, how they got started, what enabled them to be consistent and stay motivated, the results they noticed and how that encouraged them to stick with it and the evolution of their fitness. How this exercise led them to also start improving other aspects of their wellness.

So I think you’re going to get a lot of really great, solid real life examples, of creating lifestyle change from these interviews. There’s a lot of different types of guys. There’s all ages. We’ve got guys in their 30s, we’ve got guys in their 60s might even have some guys in their 70s. So lots of different age ranges here, a lot of different backgrounds, but lots of different, strategies, mindsets, lots of different really helpful information that I think is going to help you guys, especially, if you’re looking for reassurance or if you’re still struggling to be consistent, but also recognizing that, hey, this is just part of the process, right?

Sometimes you’re not going to be perfect. And that’s okay. So I’m really looking forward to this next round of episodes. Thanks, guys, for sticking with us. I appreciate you being loyal listeners to the betterment podcast and, yeah, check it out. Coming coming, coming, coming next week, Thursdays to wherever podcasts are on YouTube, on our Apple podcast, on Spotify.

And then also you can watch them in the Mansfield Yoga app or members area. Thanks, guys, for being here. I’ll see you on the next episode. I hope this inspires you to be a better man.

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