THE N8 METHOD
“I developed The N8 Method over years to work for the modern, busy lifestyle & to include what other fitness programs often fail to address…”
1 Strength Training
Strength training is at the ground level of what we do. If you weren’t already, this will help you get comfortable using weights in the gym. Proper strength development leads to greater muscle mass, better joint stability, increased bone density, and higher energy levels. Stronger muscles also aid in metabolic health. Muscle mass burns many calories, even at rest, constantly sucking glucose from the bloodstream like vacuums. This can help tremendously with weight management as it improves your bodies innate ability to manage its blood sugar and insulin levels. If we do nothing differently, we lose strength at a rate of 10-15% per decade as we age, following our mid-20’s. Therefore, if you want to be able to lift a 30lb grandchild when you’re 70, that may mean being able to comfortably press 100lbs or more overhead now, without hurting yourself. Strength training is therefore critical for maintaining independence and fitness as we age, for decades to come.
2 Cardio (High Intensity)
Cardiovascular training is an essential part of any well rounded, long-term fitness program. However, cardio isn’t just one thing—it’s at LEAST two different things. The heart is the most important muscle in the body, pushing nutrients, oxygen, and water throughout the roots of the body (your arteries), constantly feeding every other constituent tissue and organ.
Your heart is the literal supply chain for the rest of the body. As a result, it’s no surprise VO2 max has been strongly correlated with longevity and quality of life throughout aging. This is because the type of training that develops max heart and lung capacity has been shown to significantly improve metabolic health, lower blood pressure, cholesterol, and resting heart rate, and even improve insulin sensitivity. It’s also a fantastic way to expose yourself to unfamiliar movement patterns and burn a ton of calories in a very short amount of time.
3 Cardio (Steady State)
If HIIT Training is revving up your engine, Steady State Cardio is the opposite—a nice smooth steady drive. Sometimes called, “Zone 2 Training,” it’s characterized by moderate intensity and relatively longer sessions. When training in this zone, you should be able to pass the “Talk-Test”: Speaking in complete sentences while performing the exercise should be possible, just not super easy. For most, it corresponds with a heart rate between 50-70% of your max heart rate.
Zone 2 Training has been shown to enable consistency and improved recovery as well as mental relaxation. If you don’t take time to train in this manner, then the body can become metabolically inflexible, relying solely on glucose to meet cellular energy needs and never using its stockpile of fat stores, even in times of great hunger. This is no bueno! We need to remind your body how to unlock fat stores and put them back to work for you! Proper Zone 2 Training teaches our bodies to burn fat preferentially and is an absolute game-changer when applied correctly.
4 Nutrition
Eating a wide variety of foods helps to ensure you’re getting sufficient nutrients while keeping your meals interesting. We all get bored and feel stuck sometimes, even those of us who thrive on routine. When it comes to nutrition, the plan needs to be highly personalized and account for the ups and downs of life—especially unexpected ones—because they can and will come.
There are a few basics that apply to everyone. We need to limit ultra-processed foods, refined carbohydrates, and added sugars. They simply do not serve you. We also need to make sure we’re getting all the vitamins, minerals, water, electrolytes that our bodies need. Personalization, mindful eating, and lifestyle factors will drive much of the rest.
With this program, you will not only learn what you should eat, but also why you should eat them. Armed with this knowledge, you should be able to adapt what you know to any situation in life, including during travel, in order to remain on the straight and narrow path to fitness. Let’s take your nutrition to the next level!
5 Mobility & Recovery
Mobility and recovery are top priorities, just as important—or maybe even more so—as your training and nutrition. In order to grow, you’ll need to push yourself physically in ways that truly test you. But if you want to grow the most, you’ll have to work hard AND SMART.
Recovery has a lot to do with rest, stress management, and nutrition. We will construct highly customized warmup and cool-down routines for completion, to de-tension and re-tension your body favorably, pre- and post-training. It may not always be a quick fix, but I can promise you it’s the biggest game changer you likely don’t see coming.
Proper mobility, recovery, and joint health are how you insure against decades of aging that’s to come. To enjoy long, high quality lives we need to consider functional joint health, balance, stabilization, and range of motion just as important as strength.
6 Sleep
Did you know that sleeping with lights on in the room can lead to insulin-resistance? This stuff goes WAY DEEPER than you probably think. I know firsthand how frustrating the problem of crummy sleep can be. As a full-time parent, fixing my sleep hygiene has been a multi-years long process that I admit I’ll probably never be finished working on. Therefore, I’m particularly well suited to coach other busy parents and adults in the same boat as me.
From stress management to diet and exercise, to hygiene, mindset, and environmental factors, sleep is another spoke in the wheel of fitness that touches on every arena of life. This level of training and adaptative change requires we take seriously the topic of sleep. If we get this wrong, it will spill over and negatively impact every other aspect of the N8 method, from recovery to nutrition to the quality of the workouts themselves.
7 Stress Management
Having a healthy, properly basic understanding of and relation to stress is critical. After all, we’ll be creating healthy adaptative stresses in the body through exercise. But what happens when we take physical stress too far? Cortisol is meant to prepares the body for action. However, if the stressors are environmental, with no associated need for action, then the rise in blood glucose is not fueling our muscles and leads only to rises in insulin and other negative downstream effects.
That’s why it’s so important that we take a holistic approach and talk about this stuff. It’s not just about conditioning, but also nutrition, recovery, sleep, mindset, and more. And how you handle stress is not just important to all that, it may be the most fundamental and important part of all.
8 Mental Toughness
Finally, we can’t have a self-betterment process without talking about mental toughness. To be successful here means staying power, to continue practicing excellence for the long term. And the only way to do that is to develop the calloused mind. The issue is that unexpected tragedies and setbacks are going to happen. As unpleasant as it may seem, I believe that we need to, on occasion, as a part of the training protocol, purposefully practice doing unpleasant or uncomfortable things. The logic is simple—it’s going to happen to you either way. And since handling hard times is a skill that you cultivate through practice, that’s what we need to do. Anyone can get good at the skill of mental toughness, through practice. Hard times can begin to seem like opportunities. It can be a windstorm or a wind in your sails, depending how you look at it.