Joe Weaver grew up in the 50’s on a small farm in the middle of the US where he learned the value of physical labor and persistence. In the 60’s he became a hippie, learned to meditate, do yoga and started working out with weights.
In the 70’s he moved to Fairfield, Iowa and earned a degree in Business from Maharishi University of Management where he meditated twice a day with over 2000 other seekers of enlightenment.
Since then he’s been successful in several diverse businesses including farming, the manufacture and wholesaling of gift items and, most recently, developing and building small log home communities in the mountains of North Carolina.
His practice of meditation and yoga have persisted for over 40 years. But he was never able to sustain a workout routine for more than three months without falling off the wagon for years at a time.
That all changed when, at the age of 59, he discovered an obscure book on how to boost strength, endurance and recovery in any sport by using an Ayurvedic breathing technique.
After six months on that program he entered and placed 2nd in an online physique transformation contest for men over 40. (By the way: everyone else in that contest was in their early 40’s.)
Since then he has written an ebook titled The Metazone Performance Boosting System which has been sold in over 52 countries around the world. Today at 65 he is in the best shape of his life and eager to share his secrets of mind-body transformation with all who will listen.
In this interview you’ll discover:
- How you can make a Conscious Decision not to age
- The Key to Meditation (most people get this wrong)
- What it takes to Meditate one hour twice per day…and why you shouldn’t start here.
- How Meditation makes changing Habits Easier
- Why Non-Stop Nasal Breathing in Exercise makes it Easier, Energizing More Enjoyable and Improves Recovery
- What it Takes to Optimize Your Respiratory System
- Which Mantra do you buy into? “No Pain, No Gain” vs. “Stimulate, Nourish and Grow”
- The Six Tastes and Ayuvedic Churnas
- And Much More
Check out Joe’s Metazone Performance System
Also here is the book mentioned, Body, Mind and Sport by John Douillard
Click the link below to access the complete transcript.
[spoiler]The content found on the Vital Way podcast in Superman Herbs is for informational purposes only and is not intended as medical advice, for the diagnosis or treatment of a health condition or as a substitute for medical counseling. Please review any information with your qualified healthcare provider before making any decisions concerning your health. You assume all risk for use, misuse or disuse of this information.
Logan: Welcome to the Vital Way Podcast. I’m Logan Christopher and we have another exciting episode for you lined up today. Joining me in the call is Joe Weaver who, despite having the lifelong meditation and yoga practice, had difficulty staying on any exercise program for any real length of time. That all changed when he discovered for himself an old Ayurvedic breathing technique that helped transform his body in training. He then went on to place second in an online physique transformation contest for men over 40 and he was around 60 at the time so that’s pretty cool. We’ll be diving into more detail onto this but since that time he has put together the Metazone Performance Breathing System and taught it worldwide. So thanks for joining me, Joe.
Joe: Hi, good to be with you, Logan.
Logan: Yeah. I appreciate what you’re doing because so many people culturally buy into the idea that it’s all downhill after middle age and I personally like to look at people that choose not to follow that paradigm and I would say you’re definitely one of those people.
Joe: Thank you. It’s really a conscious decision. I know a lot of people they start getting older and they just—well, I think it’s a conscious decision but is also is cumulative result of habits that you’ve established over your lifetime. Because the thing that closes people down, shuts down their energy, it makes them not believe that they can be more or do more is stress. Accumulation of stress over a person’s lifetime just starts to weigh on you like a heavy weight and it weighs on your body and your mind. So I can really understand why a lot of people just sort of give up and just sort of run into a lot of health problems as a result.
Logan: Yeah. Well speaking of habits, one thing that I definitely want to dive into a little bit is you’ve been meditating for over 40 years now. Can you tell us a little bit about how you got started in that? Have you been following the same type of meditation the whole time and how has that daily or regular habit impacted your life?
Joe: Yeah, that was a very interesting thing. When I was around 24 years old or 25 years old, I think, I noticed there was something missing in my life and I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what it was. This was back around 1975. So I had some bright idea that what I’d do to find out what was missing would be go to visit all my friends that were doing different things around the country. So I decided I’d just hike around the country and visit all my friends and see what was happening. So I did that and I started out in Indiana where I was living and I hitchhiked down into Tennessee. Then I was there for a while and Oklahoma for a while.
Then eventually I went to Boulder, Colorado because there was, in 1975, about every sort of alternative thing was happening in Boulder, Colorado and I went there. This was over a period of about maybe two or three months. In Boulder, Colorado, I was getting disgruntled because I did not find anything that really resonated with me. I was trying a whole lot of different sort of things, different spiritual things, different lifestyle things. So I’d pretty much given up and I decided to go see an old friend that I haven’t seen for about four years. That was a very interesting meeting because I hadn’t seen her for four years and I noticed when we were talking when we got together that she was a lot more spontaneous, she was a lot happier and she was a lot more focused. Just her energy was way up from what it had been. So I asked her what she was doing and she had just started doing transcendental meditation. So I decided okay, this sounds like this might be something that would work for me.
I hitchhiked back to Oklahoma and found a teacher there and decided I’d learn and after being instructed, I went home to meditate and it was just really, really easy. It was like I had just closed my eyes and 20 minutes later I just opened my eyes and I looked at the clock and 20 minutes had passed and I wondered what had happened. But I felt really good and I felt really refreshed so I decided well, maybe I’ll continue on with this. I’ve talked to a lot of people over the years, people that tried different kinds of meditation and things like that but I think the key for me was that it was enjoyable and easy right from the get-go and that made it something that would be sustainable over time.
Logan: Yeah, that’s interesting to note because a lot of people don’t really necessarily find it easy and enjoyable. Do you think there is anything about you that made it as such that maybe other people could try to borrow from or get in your shoes for that?
Joe: Well, this is not an advertisement for TM at all but that’s over 40 years ago. So I’ve met a lot of people that do other kinds of meditation and talked to quite a few folks. The theme that comes up is that I found a lot of people saying that meditation was difficult for them or it was hard for them or it’s hard to sit still or their mind kept racing. I think it makes a great difference what kind of meditation you do.
I’m not a fan of concentration. I think meditation should be effortless and that is something that doesn’t come easy to people in our culture. But if you have a good teacher that can show you what to do, it’s a very simple process. The process is so easy that a lot of people want to complicate it or they want to push on it. They want to make it do something. I recently heard a YouTube video with Peter Ragnar talking about meditation and I completely agree with Peter that it’s not something that you try to manipulate. You take the process, it can be a very easy process, TM is extremely easy but it’s just a matter of taking a mantra and then you repeat the mantra very gently in your mind. When you notice that you’re thinking about something else other than the mantra then just very gently you come back to doing the mantra again. So it’s just the simplest little thing and it’s easy to mess that up by trying to get a certain result, trying to have certain feeling. It’s all about just the process.
And over the last 40 years, I’ve seen that process. I’ve seen what happens in meditation from different. There are some days when I just I don’t know if I could do this but the thing is it’s a process of release of stress and that’s what the process does. So you just do the process. You don’t worry about whether it’s working or how you’re feeling or things like that. Most often, things will calm down. Your body will calm down, especially if you do meditations at the same time every day, your body, it’s like a biomechanical sort of thing that happens. Your body gets used to settling down and your metabolism, the breath rates settle down at a certain time of the day to the extent that after you’ve done it for several weeks then if you’re not doing it at that time of day, you’ll notice that everything sort of slows down for you. It’s a sign that your body has already gotten into that habit. So I think that is an important aspect of making it a habit at the same time every day so that you optimize whatever results you’re going to get.
Logan: Absolutely. The body kind of falls into that rhythm along with it. I like when you said that it’s really about focusing on the process. Oftentimes, especially in the western culture, we get hung up on the outcome. There’s a time and a place to focus on an outcome but that’s probably not the best way to think about meditation. I’m curious. You’ve been doing this for a long time. Has anything evolved or is it very much sort of the same sort of process and practice as when you got started?
Joe: Can you repeat that? I didn’t get exactly what was—
Logan: Over your 40 years, has your sort of practice with this, what you do with it, evolved in any sort of ways? Were there certain changes over those years or is it very much the same as when you got started?
Joe: When I got started, I was doing 20 minutes twice a day. I’d do it in the morning when I’d wake up and I’d do it in the evening when I got done working before I eat dinner. After doing that for a couple of years, actually after doing it for six months, my teacher suggested I go on a weekend course where you do actually more meditation and that was something that radically changed my experience of meditation.
I think I went on Friday evening and then the first morning on Saturday, I was instructed to do two meditations instead of just one. So I did my first meditation and it was just sort of uneventful. It was just sort of what it was. It wasn’t particularly deep but it didn’t have a whole lot of thoughts. I wasn’t too bored but it was just okay. Then I started my second meditation, started doing it for a second time for 20 minutes and it went really, really deep, so deep that I was sitting on my bed and at one point I was startled by a loud noise. What the noise was my arms both simultaneously went out and hit the wall at the back of me. I didn’t know that happened right away until I noticed the noise first before I had actually noticed my arms moving. When that happened, I thought there’s something powerful happening here.
That whole weekend was like taking a deep bath in meditation and really getting a taste of how powerful the technique was so that when I came back to work on Monday, it was sort of like going from a black and white world to a colored world. It was like all the colors of everything were brighter. I had a lot more energy and it seemed like I was making more jokes than I usually would make. So the humor explosions actually went up.
Once I did that then it was like I wanted to go to every weekend course that I could get to. So started going to a couple of them. It was really nice because you get to a place where you’re meditating and you have deeper experiences with it but that’s nice. But the point of meditation is not what happens during the meditation. The point of meditation is what happens after meditation, how it affects your life and how has it impact your life. I was definitely noticing a lot of positive changes in my life as a result of getting this sort of deeper rest. The instruction was all about when you meditate and you release stress, and as a result of releasing stress, you can realize more of your natural potential. That was really my experience basically. That was it.
I was interested in more things. I became actually more ambitious to do more things. I became more ambitious to go back to school. That’s when I started going back to school at a community college and studying music, which what I was really into. While I was at that community college, I learned that there was a special weekend course at this university of transcendental meditation people had set up in Iowa called Maharishi at University of Management. I said well, that should be really interesting and I went to that. Little did I know there were like about 2,002 students and faculty and everybody and they were in the middle of doing additional mediations for an extended period of time like for a whole month. It was part of the curriculum. So I went to this residence course and it was just a super saturation. It was like meditations were really, really deep. I won’t go into this. It’s not as important about what you’re experience is but after that, I felt even more energy and enthusiasm to do things.
I actually decided to investigate that university. After I investigated it, I switched and enrolled in Maharishi University of Management where they taught all the regular subjects, philosophy, physics, business, literature, just a whole range of subjects but the main thing was everybody meditated with each other, with everybody else twice a day. You probably haven’t had this on your podcast before but the thing is that was a really, really powerful environment, really quite amazing experience. To meditate with 2000 people twice a day is like sort of like a superconductor is what I’d say. If I was thinking that things were going well before then and that I was even having good experiences during meditation, meditating with that big group was like you just go into that group and then immediately you’re meditation is at such a deep level. There’s so much silence. There’s just so much silence and it is so rich and it feels so good. It certainly feels totally refreshing. It’s just like, where has this feeling been all my life? This is just pure bliss. That’s about the only way I can describe it. Not every meditation is like that as a student but most of them were.
Since that time, I’ve been learning some advanced techniques that were along Patanjali’s yoga sutras and integrating those with meditation practice. Then my meditation practice went from 20 minutes to about an hour twice a day. If you can believe this, I’ve been doing that an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening for about 38 years, while simultaneously running successful businesses.
Logan: Well, I imagine the health, I mean you’re talking about all these benefits, having greater energy, clearer thoughts, feeling happier so although that’s two hours out of every 24-hour day, you can then be more effective with the rest of that time, right?
Joe: Yeah, it’s like I definitely would not do it if the return on my investment wasn’t worthwhile. If I didn’t feel I was getting that amount of benefits I wouldn’t have continued to do it. It’s one thing to have more energy, more success, more happiness but also more inner contentment and better relationships with people. So the list goes on and on and on. If you’re less stressed, if you’re more your true self and you are naturally more happy about everything in life regardless of what happens, whether it’s something you label good or bad, whatever happens in your life, your awareness is going to look upon everything in a much more happy state, in a more restive state and in a state that doesn’t get overshadowed by whatever happens.
Logan: I’m actually working on a book, all about habit change and everything that goes with that. One thing I’ve noticed is that people and meditation, all these people are talking about the benefits of it and a lot of people getting excited and for a whatever reason a lot of people seem to have trouble with this one, apart from that reason you said that they have a hard time sitting still and not doing anything. You have to dedicate yourself to something for enough time that you start to see the benefits from it. Once that point comes then it becomes really easy to do something. It becomes thinking like, why would I not be doing this? You were saying you get the return on investment for the two hours that you spend doing it. Of course, people shouldn’t be starting with two hours. You can get benefits from meditating for a much smaller amount of time but that really speaks to that, the meditation helps to bring that awareness so then you can begin to notice the benefits that come from meditation, too.
Joe: Yes, exactly. It’s like the whole thing about habits. I was studying something about how the brain works. It’s like we get into a habit and it is sort of like those neurotransmitters get a circuits going and it becomes sort of like a groove in a record where you’re just in that room and you keep on doing the same thing over and over. What I’ve found meditation was like instead of you is being in the valley of the groove, it was sort of like it made those walls on the sides less high. You sort of elevate your awareness so that it’s easier to incorporate new habits and it’s easier to get rid of old habits.
That data is key because I think it’s basically sort of stress that keeps us in a lot of old habits and it’s stress that keeps us in a lot of negative habits. If you get rid of that stress then it’s just like you’re free. You’re free of the bonds of that and as a result, you have more ability, it’s easier, it becomes easier to latch onto a new habit and get that new habit established. But it is necessary, like you say, to actually block off the time and take an information diet. There are hundreds of ways of meditating out there. Well, pick one that you resonate with and then practice it regularly for a month or so before you even decide whether it’s working or not. Don’t judge it by your experience necessarily during meditation but your experiences afterwards.
Logan: Yes, and that’s a good key, too. So I’m curious. Did working on the meditations, did that lead you to sort of investigating breathing exercises or did that come through a different path?
Joe: Well, it’s interesting. The breathing thing is actually a technique from Ayurveda. It’s like Ayurveda is the source of actually the Indian preventative health care sort of. There are actually universities in India to teach people how to be Ayurvedic physicians. But it’s a much more subtle science and it’s a science that had been accumulated knowledge for thousands of years. So the thing is that yoga originates in Ayurveda, just like meditation does. So these different breathing techniques, a lot of these breathing techniques, there are several dozens of breathing techniques that are part of yoga culture.
What I found was I was reading an old book by Dr. John Douillard who along with Deepak Chopra opened one of the Ayurvedic clinics in the United States back in early ‘90s or ‘80s. This John Douillard, he was a triathlete and he was also chiropractor. So he went over to India and studied with some of these Ayurvedic physicians, looking for a way to increase athletic performance. So when he did that, he started to practice these techniques himself and he found this one breathing technique to work really well on a variety of different kinds of sports. So he wrote a book called Body, Mind and Sport back in 1994 and it had some pretty glorying reviews, even from a bunch of superstar athletes in tennis, baseball and some other sports that were using that breathing technique to improve their performance.
I heard about it back in 1994 and I thought this is a bunch of rubbish. How could breathing have anything to do with—I’ve always been into lifting weights and bodybuilding, not just power lifting but body building more than anything else so I thought this is just something that doesn’t make sense. They’re just making a mood out of this and it’s just one of those crazy ideas. So I didn’t pay any attention to it until about I was like in my 50s. I was like about 59 and my goal for about two years has been to get into really good shape for my 60th birthday.
What happened was I happened to be in a friend’s house and they had that old book by Douillard. I picked it up and I read the first chapter. The first chapter said just try this; in your next workout, only breathe through your nose on your exhale and your inhale and when it gets too hard to breathe through your nose, when you feel like you have to breathe through your mouth, just back off the intensity of what you’re doing. If you’re doing weights then lower your weights a little bit. If you’re running, slow down a little bit. Just back off the intensity until you can comfortably do the nasal breathing again. That was all it said. And I thought okay, I’m going to go down to my workout room and try it out right now. I don’t have anything else to lose because frankly, I’ve never been able to keep regular and consistent on an exercise program for more than two or three months and then I’d fall off the wagon for five or ten years or more.
So I was at a stage where I was willing to try anything because I was getting bored and ready to hang it up. Trying it that one time when I got done doing that first workout with that nasal breathing, I just wondered if I was doing it right because I felt like I hadn’t done any work. I hadn’t lowered my weights that much to make it that easy. I just thought this is weird. But the next morning I woke up and the first thought that I had before I even opened my eyes was I feel so good, I want to do that again. That wasn’t my usual response. My usual response was working out hard and then I’m sort of fatigued the next morning. I usually would not workout consistently for several days. I’d work out one day and then have a rest day and then maybe work out one day or two days at the most. But I recovered really, really fast in that technique.
So then I went on and learned more about some of the fine points to that technique and exercise became so enjoyable. That’s really what happened. It was like all of a sudden instead of it being like a chore, doing this nasal breathing technique was like energizing and calming at the same time. It actually gave me more power. After doing this for about two or three weeks, I was actually lifting heavier weights and still just breathing through my mouth. For the first time in my life, I was able to be consistent with exercise for like five to six months.
Then I noticed there was this online physique contest. So I entered it and I came in on second in the category of men over 40. The guy that beat me was 42 and the guy that came in third was 40. I was just like really amazed because I got totally ripped and here I was 60 years old. I looked better than I’d ever looked in my life. I felt better than I’d ever felt in my life. So I’ve pretty much continued on with that for the last five years.
Logan: And I would encourage people to either punch Joe Weaver into Google or the show notes we have a picture of him. You’re what now 65?
Joe: Yeah.
Logan: But yeah, pretty amazing body for pretty much any age really.
Joe: Yeah. I’m 60 years old. My wife and I went down Siesta Key in Florida. I’m walking on the beach and a couple of ladies in their 40s are walking towards me. They get about 20 feet in front of me and one of them—what did she say? She said, “You must do pushups every day.” I said no, it’s just a couple of times a week. And she said, “Well anyway, great pecs” and I was like ah, t would have been nice if I could have had this experience when I was 20 but I’ll take it now.
Logan: I’m curious. I’m with you. I’ve done a lot of working with breathing and a big proponent of nasal breathing but why did you believe that this form of breathing that you are just talking about really delivers all those benefits?
Joe: Okay. Well, one of the things that’s happened is that I wrote an eBook which is at MetazoneSystem.com and it’s the Metazone Performance Boosting System. It’s about my experiences and some of the people that I’ve worked with coaching and training. So the common experience seems to be there’s one test by actually John Douillard back in the ‘90s and the results of that test are rather startling. I’m surprised that more people in the media haven’t picked it up. It was a scientific test where they took six guys, they hooked them up to brainwave monitors, heart monitors, breath rate monitors and—I’m not sure—there could have been something else and they did a scientific test. There were stationary bikes. They increased the resistance on those bikes over time and they measured all those things I was just talking about. The instructions for the guys riding the bikes was just breathe the way you normally would. The guys came in on the first test and they were breathing at a rate starting out at about 12 to 14 breaths per minute. By the time they got done with the test, they were breathing at 47 breaths per minute and they were huffing and puffing and sort of out of wind.
Then those same six guys, they showed those guys how to do nasal breathing and they told them to do the nasal breathing to practice it for the next two weeks. So they instructed them do it for a couple of weeks and then they tested them again. They said okay, this time all they do is the nasal breathing the way that we’ve trained you for the entire duration. They started out at the same breaths per minute which was 12 to 14 but by the end, and this is the same resistance, they’re pedaling just as fast with the same amount of resistance, they were breathing at 14 breaths per minute in contrast to the guys that were doing 47 breaths per minute.
That’s the only known scientific study that I’ve seen but what it causes me to conjecture is that what’s happening is that they’re optimizing respiratory efficiency and I think you get more oxygen into your muscles. It’s a better delivery system, you’re both getting more oxygen in and you’re getting more carbon dioxide out because it’s more a diaphragm-type breathing and you’re breathing deeper. I know that the lower lobes of your lungs have the most blood vessels in them. So it makes sense that if you’re breathing more deeply and more fully instead of taking the shallow breaths that a lot of people do when they’re exercising, that what you’re doing is if you’re exhaling fully then that next inhale, all the air, the oxygen is going to go right down to the bottom of your lungs first. As a result, you’re going to get more oxygen optimization. I think that’s basically the big thing.
Logan: Yeah, that makes sense. That reminds me of something because I was looking through studies. I didn’t come across this one but breathing nasally actually adds nitric oxide to the air which helps with the circulation and other things so I believe that’s probably likely one of the components that is helping here as well because breathing through the mouth does not do that same thing.
Joe: Yes, I have to get to it, there’s a book. There’s a guy that did some extensive research on the Buteyko breathing methods. He just came out with a book some time in the last year that I’ve heard really great things about. I’ve heard certain doctors were saying some great things about it and he brought up that point about the nitric. So I think there’s a bunch of things happening. The neat thing that I found that happens that is very addictive is the inner zone experience that you get. It’s like that runner’s high. You can get it. You don’t have to be a runner. You can get it at anything. I found a couple of winters ago you can get it when you’re shoveling snow. It’s the most amazing thing.
What happened was I was at a friend’s house and it snowed about eight inches the night before. His guy who usually cleared his driveway wasn’t available so I said I’d go out and shovel it because I was his guest. I started off doing this. I grew up on a farm so I was not averse to physical labor. I know how to do it. You just put your shoulder into it and I started doing it. Then when you get gassed then you lean on your shovel for a minute or two and catch your breath and then start again. That’s the way I started out but then I remembered I had this technique that I used lifting weights and I wondered how that would work. So I started to do the nasal breathing.
There are a couple fine points about slight constriction in the back of your throat while you’re exhaling but those are some fine points. Basically what happened was I ended up shoveling snow. Here I am, 60-something and I’m shoveling snow for an hour and I don’t stop the whole time. The whole time, I let that nasal breathing be my regulator, which is another interesting function that it does because it’s your regulator of intensity. As you develop more capacity, lung capacity, and get more oxygen optimization then you can operate at a higher level of intensity.
So I’d already been using this for a couple of years so I was at a pretty high level. I’m at a place where I can do a 60- to 80- yard sprint full out and do it all nasal breathing and when I get done I’m still nasal breathing and I’m not gasping for air. So I was shoveling the snow and I got done in hour later. That’s when it really hit me because I didn’t feel any fatigue at all and I felt totally jazzed. I felt totally, totally jazzed and energized. That was really proof to me that this system can work during any kind of physical activity.
Logan: I find that very interesting because I do all kinds of weird stuff from juggling weights to bending horseshoes and whatnot. I’m a big proponent of actually keeping things relatively easy. I know that of course there’s a time and a place to work hard but I really like this because if you’re staying with the nasal breathing and not going into the point where you are trying to take in more oxygen through mouth breathing then, as you said, it’s going to be the regulator for it. The truth is most people that are doing things need to learn how to do things easier. You don’t have to work hard in order to expand what you can do. The body doesn’t really care as long as you’re doing enough to cause adaptation to occur. The body will adapt to it. Whether you try really hard or not is kind of irrelevant but I think that’s a really cool piece of this puzzle in there.
Joe: I couldn’t agree with you more. I see it as a whole paradigm that we’ve grown up with, that in order to improve our performance or in order to improve our fitness we have to sort of punish the body. So we don’t trust the body to do that on its own. One of the reason you see all these extreme sports is that sort of I call it a militaristic view of fitness where you have to beat the hell out of the body in order to get it to do anything, where actually it’s much more sustainable and you get much better performance if instead of going with the no pain-no gain, go with the stimulate, nourish and grow as a mantra and trust your body to actually give you more performance if you nourish it.
Logan: Yeah, I like to think of it like I want to treat my body as an ally, not an enemy. That militaristic approach, yeah, I definitely see that all over there. This probably changes all the time but what does sort of a typical workout for you look like using this?
Joe: Okay. Well, I like to change up my workout periodically. I like to change them up periodically but if I’m getting strength gains, I don’t like to stop what I’m doing. I’ll keep going once I’m on a roll. I’ve been on this roll of working out during a three-day split and doing it Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Because I got to thinking, what can I do where I will see gains myself but also that I can tell other people to do this program and it will be sustainable for you in your lifestyle?
So number one, for the most part the average Joe, so to speak, I think three days a week is a sweet spot. I think people can be more consistent and stick with three days a week. That’s my personal experience. You can do other things but there’s life and life gets in your way a lot of times so I think that’s why I sort of come out to three. Whatever I do, I want it to be replicable by other people. So I’m doing three days a week, a body part split of chest, triceps then legs, shoulders and lastly back and biceps. I’ll do a little bit of ab work each of those days. Then I like to at least get in 25 to 30-minute brisk walks on my off days. A lot of times I like to fit in one or two days interval sprints on an off day. That’s basically what I do sort of in an overview.
Logan: Thanks and obviously it’s working quite well for you.
Joe: Yeah, it’s nice. I’m doing exercises like weighted pull-ups, weighted dips and things like that. I think those are really good sort of basic strength builders.
Logan: Yeah, I love those exercises myself. So I’m curious and people are probably wondering what your diet looks like. Obviously, body transformation or in just being healthy, that’s going to be a big part of the puzzle. You’ve got to breathe right, you’ve got to move right and you’ve got to eat right, too. What does that look like for you?
Joe: Okay. Well, I’m a big fan of intermittent fasting for getting ripped, for getting to lean body fat percentages. There are different methods that work for different people, depending on your lifestyle. I’ve used a couple of different methods like the 24-hour kind that Brad Pilon first came out with. I’ve also used 16/8. Any of those that you find that work for you are good. It’s a really easy, convenient way to do calorie restriction without it seeming like a restriction.
Other than that, my diet on a typical day, I’ll have scrambled eggs in the morning with maybe a piece of whole grain sprouted toast and maybe some almond butter and some clarified butter, ghee. For lunch, I’ll have maybe four different kinds of vegetables that I steam. One of those vegetables would be sweet potatoes. Then I’ll maybe make some quinoa then some lean meat with that. Dinnertime, I’m more partial to soups. Like you said, I don’t keep any processed foods around. I don’t keep much sweet things around. My wife makes this wonderful recipe where she melts part of a semi-sweet chocolate bar into a pint of heavy whipping cream. She melts that and then she puts that in the fridge and sometimes we’ll whip it. But it’s just the greatest, full fat, decadent delight without getting into simple sugars. I never got into the habit of drinking coffee or tea. Water is fine for me so I just do that.
Logan: Yeah, sounds pretty simple yet effective if you get away from the processed crap it’s pretty easy to eat pretty decently.
Joe: The thing is a lot of people might think this sounds kind of boring. Ayurveda has a bunch of things. One of them is a spice mix called churnas. There are several different types of churnas depending on sort of your body type or things but I like this one that’s a recipe—you could Google it probably—vata churna. Ayurveda says that anytime you get all six tastes in a meal, you’re going to be more satisfied both physically and emotionally than if you are missing one of those things. That’s a nice theory. I’ll have my vegetables. I’ll steam the vegetables, I’ll put a bunch of clarified butter which is ghee which is a really great form, huge amounts of benefits in ghee, I’ll put that on my vegetable and then I’ll put this vata churna on. Then maybe I’ll sprinkle a little bit of bread on top of that.
The taste is so full with those spices from the churna that it’s just really satisfying. You can eat simply but if you use spices then you are eating like royally because it just tastes totally delicious. The secret to why processed foods are so good is because they sort of stimulate the taste buds in sort of a nefarious way with some of the different chemicals. But what happens if you use spices well, they will be actually more satisfying to your palate, to your taste buds than what you find in the processed foods. I think that’s a big component that a lot of people don’t latch onto and as a result they think it just sounds boring.
Logan: How do you spell churnas?
Joe: C-H-U-R-N-A.
Logan: All right, that’s what I thought.
Joe: The plural of that is churnas and there are usually a lot of churnas, pitta churna, kapha churna, and those certain things.
Logan: Right, the three doshas. So you’re vata dosha? Is that correct? If you’re using that type?
Joe: That is correct. I’m very much a vata dosha, especially after 55 your vata tends to increase.
Logan: Right. That’s about that time in life. I really like what you’re saying there because that’s something we often talk about, how there are different tastes in the western society. We have sweet and salty basically in our entire food supply somewhere. We’re missing all the other tastes. People don’t like bitter-tasting things. Most people don’t like sour-tasting things. Some people like the pungent flavor. So definitely with the herbs and the Super Man Herbs we sell, the different herbs that is not necessarily not the culinary type of herbs things you want to flavor things with but that same idea is there. It’s really important. You’ve got to bring those different tastes because the different tastes reflect different phytochemical profiles and all these other benefits that go along with that taste. So it’s not something that is chemically manufactured.
Joe: Yeah. And you guys do a great job. You have a lot of great herbs and a lot of great Ayurvedic herbs. The knowledge behind these stuff is thousands of years old. It stood the test of time.
Logan: Yeah, absolutely. Okay. Well, I think we’re coming up upon an hour here. Any last words or final things you’d like to kind of wrap with as far as what we’ve talked about today in the training, nutrition, breathing and meditation? We covered a lot of ground so I’m hoping people learned some things with this. I know I’m personally excited. I definitely played around a lot with the nasal breathing but I’m going to specifically be working with that in my next few workouts.
Joe: Yeah. Here’s the thing. I’m 65 years old and I feel like I’m 25. It’s not like I have unusual genes or anything like that. It’s just I found these different techniques that have optimized my natural potential. I’ll never be a great athlete. I don’t have the desire and I don’t have the body for that but I can look fantastic and I can feel fantastic and that is the main takeaway that I’d like to inspire people. It’s don’t give up. Keep looking. Things can be simple and yet really effective. You can be vibrant and have great health way later than our culture believes, into you 80s, into your 90s. My goal is to get to my 100s and still feel good, still be flexible, strong and look great. It’s a possibility and we’re just now on the edge of starting to discover what’s possible so it’s a great time to be alive.
Logan: Absolutely. I’m looking forward to you getting older because that’s just more time to work at the things that I love working at. So I expect to be better when I’m older, not decaying and hate my life because it hurts and that sort of thing. So where can people can go to find more information? We’ll be sure to include the ones to your website, your eBooks, the other book you mentioned and all that within the show notes as well. So where would you like to send people?
Joe: Just MetazoneSystem.com. That’s like the sales page for my Metazone Performance Boosting system. I haven’t really done a whole lot with blog posts and stuff like that but that is the sort of the best place to go for the nasal breathing technique and how to use it for bodybuilding purposes.
Logan: Excellent. I think people learned enough that they can start applying this. As you said, some of those finer details, they probably want to find out in that eBook, right?
Joe: That’s right. Take what we’ve been talking about and you can already get a lot of benefits just form what we’ve talked about in this interview.
Logan: Excellent. Well, thank you so much, Joe. I had a lot of fun with this discussion. Like I said, I’m excited to do my next few workouts working on this stuff some more.
Joe: Okay, great talking with you, Logan.
Logan: All right, thanks everyone for listening.[/spoiler]
- Yang, Qi, Mitochondria and Chronic Fatigue - March 27, 2024
- Eczema: A Natural Approach to Soothing Your Skin - March 10, 2024
- Harmless vs. Pathogenic E. coli - February 27, 2024
Ax says
Cant download mp3 as I’d like to listen while traveling. Please fix link.
Logan Christopher says
There is a little download button under the Play button that works just fine. Here is that download link – http://audello-h-154bf65642b54d.s3.amazonaws.com/050-effortlessmeditationandbreathingwithjoeweaver.mp3