Engineer Your Body To Improve Your Mind - Aaron Alexander

... 100% of the time, you are under a state of construction, and all your body knows is environmental stimuli. And so you have this amazing opportunity to, through exposure therapy, you can start to make yourself be stronger or weaker. So if you don't expose your body to enough exposure in the form of heat, in the form of cold, in the form of some type of hermetic stressor, then the body will start to atrophy, because it's inherently incredibly lazy.

(wind blowing) Th- th- there won't be a single shot where I can put my hand in all of these, will there? (hands clapping)

No, not really. I mean, I guess there's this kind of (overlapping) . Oh, d- d- do you need to see it? I thought it was just an audio thing.

Well, no, because what you're trying to do is you're syncing-

So you're seeing a blip.

You're syncing the audio with the video.

You can see it.

You can watch it.

Oh. I thought it was just an audio blip, but yeah, you're right. God dang it.

What can I say, man?

I'm not a videographer.

No, no, but that's-

I just like clapping.

Y- just here to clap.

Maybe we both clap. (hands clapping)

Yes.

Boom!

Fucking-

All angles!

Podcast time.

We're in!

Podcast time.

Yeah, we're locked in.

Aaron Alexander, welcome to the show.

Christopher, thank you for making this happen. It's been a got-dang pleasure getting to know you over the last few weeks.

So good, man.

Yeah?

Yeah. The bromance has happened quickly.

Bromance is real.

It's got serious-

Yep.

... very fast.

Yep. We're moving quick.

How would you describe your approach to fitness? I've been very interested since I've been out here, we've trained a fair bit. We've done some sessions barefooted in, on it, doing sprint training, and contralateral movements, and all manner of different things that, as someone that's spent a lot of time training, I've seen online, but I'm n- not really been exposed to very much. And I'm quite interested to work out how you arrive at whatever view of health and fitness it is that you have.

Yeah. Um, so my... First, thanks for doing this. I appreciate it. Uh, my background mostly was in manual therapy. Like, my main field of, of specialty is working with people from hands-on body work. Uh, and s- before that, it was, it was training. Uh, but my main interest really has been helping people come into alignment with their bodies, uh, so that we can get them to a point that when they move through their lives, uh, as they are breathing, as they're just living their lives, they can be almost self-organizing into a greater place of alignment, of balance, of homeostasis, just through their existence. And that sounds a little bit maybe like meta and out there, um, so specifically what that means is looking at what are the, the variables, the environmental conditions that are forming the body to fit into the positions that might create discomfort or dis-ease. And so my approach to fitness, um, isn't so much about what we're doing in a gym, it's more what we're doing for all the times that we're not in the gym, and I consider the, the gym to be... For me, the gym's like, uh, my buddy Kelly Starrett, who he did the, the forward for my, my book coming up, um, he calls it, like, classical ballet. You know, so when you're in the gym, you're working on these classical forms to bring your body into balance enough that you can go out and do modern dance, you know, modern dances the rest of your life. And so what I'm really interested with, with fitness predominantly is, uh, how do you start to integrate the concepts that you'd learn in a gym, in a yoga studio, um, in a martial arts studio, into the way that you show up in business, in, you know, when you're out on a date with somebody, when you're s- at your house watching Netflix? All of that is fitness, and your body doesn't know the difference between, "I'm in a yoga studio," or, "I'm just, you know, at my, my house in my underpants."