The Correlation Between Business Health And Physical Health (ft. Marcus Filly)

Logan Shinholser
Everyone, welcome back to the Contractor Growth Network podcast. I’m Logan Shinholser, and today I am joined by a unique guest. His name is Marcus Filly. He’s an entrepreneur. He runs a business that is all about functional body building. Now, Marcus is an incredible athlete. He’s been to the CrossFit Games six times. And if you have never watched the CrossFit games, these are people that are able to back squat 500 pounds and then turn around and run a five minute mile. So the. The fact that he was able to sustain this level of athleticism for that long of a time horizon is truly mind blowing. As somebody me who does CrossFit for the past ten years now, Marcus also has turned his background into actually running an entire business that focuses on what is called functional bodybuilding.

Logan Shinholser
So I asked Marcus to join us on the podcast today to talk all about the overlap between health and fitness and becoming a better entrepreneur. I absolutely loved this episode and interview. Let’s get into it. All right, Marcus. So, for those in the audience that are listening that may not know who is Marcus Filly? Can you give us your background, please?

Marcus Filly
Absolutely. Yeah. I’m a 39 year old husband and father, and I’ve got two kids. And my back story starts as a just an athletic kid growing up who was great in a few sports and also great in the math and sciences. And so as I went through school being a student athlete, I made my way into collegiate sports. I played division one soccer at UC Berkeley, was a pre med student there, and got exposure to a lot of strength sports, health, science, while I was at Berkeley with this intention of going into medicine. But I combined that with my passion for sport, which ultimately turned into a passion for fitness because I found out in college, through the introduction to collegiate strength and conditioning, how much I loved training for sport rather than the sport itself.

Marcus Filly
So I kind of looked to find a way to combine my passion for health, fitness, medical sciences into a career. And I went to medical school at the Ohio State University for a year. And after a year, I decided to step away and kind of go and try to pursue a dream in the fitness industry. And then my time in the fitness industry has been essentially the last 15 years, dabbling in all types of things, growing my own businesses, promoting the brand of CrossFit for many years, being an athlete in the sport of CrossFit, a coach, a gym owner, an online business owner, and now somebody who just deeply wants to help people make sustainable and long term changes to their health and fitness so that they can live more fulfilling lives.

Logan Shinholser
The way that I found you, Marcus, was. I mean, I’ve followed you on Instagram for now years, and I love everything you put out, but, I mean, I do. I’ve done CrossFit on and off for the most part, mostly on for the greater part of the past ten years. You went to the CrossFit Games. Can you talk a bit about what it takes? Because on tv you look at it’s like watching the Olympics where you’re like, well, they’re fast, but I don’t know how much faster they are than me. Can you talk a bit about what it really takes as an athlete to make it to the CrossFit Games?

Marcus Filly
Sure. Yeah. If, you know, if the listener is familiar with CrossFit because they’ve done CrossFit and you’ve done it at like an affiliate or one of the gyms, a CrossFit gym. What’s interesting is you’ll go into a CrossFit gym and there will be, there’ll be some athletes in there that have standout, you know, skills and strengths and abilities. And back when I coached at across the gym and I trained at across the gym, there were members that could do many of the things that I did to a very close and in some cases like a superior level.

Marcus Filly
But there was rarely somebody that could do two things to the same degree or level or, you know, and certainly not many people that could do three or more things and then zero people that could do high level skills, strength and capabilities in CrossFit across twelve workouts within two and a half days. So being a CrossFit competitor was about becoming elite at every discipline that CrossFit offered. So you couldn’t have holes in your game, you couldn’t be strong, but not have good endurance. You just wouldn’t, you know, you wouldn’t make it through the qualification process. So you had to have an elite level at every stage of training. You needed to not, you know, your relative weaknesses had to be still superior to 99.9% of people out there doing CrossFit.

Marcus Filly
And then you had to have a very robust ability, capacity to recover because the sport was not just about one performance. How well can you do? It was about how well could you perform twelve events over the span of two and a half, three days, six to twelve events, rather, which is like telling somebody like, okay, you’re going to go run your first marathon and you want to get a good time. All right, cool. You check that box. Now you want to go run your first marathon and you want to beat your last time, and eventually, you want to get your marathon time under 3 hours. That’s a, you know, that’s a high level. Not many people do a sub three hour marathon.

Marcus Filly
Okay, now that you’ve done a sub three hour marathon, let’s try and do three days in a row of a sub three hour marathon, you know, and that just each step of that becomes, it requires longer time preparation, so more and more years accumulated and a higher volume of training time on a daily, weekly, monthly basis so that you can just tolerate, like, when it comes time to do the event. Your body is so used to doing that much more that it feels less. Yeah, less of a full, you know, a full effort of everything that you have that you can’t recover from. And what that ended up looking like in practical terms was, you know, three to 4 hours a day of pretty hard training, plus another two to 3 hours of, you know, focus recovery.

Marcus Filly
Like, just like, time spent focusing on how do I heal and recover from that work. And it was five to six days a week of that for my career was, like, eight years long.

Logan Shinholser
There’s a ton of overlap between sports and business. So I wanted to know from Marcus, how has his sports background translated into his own entrepreneur journey?

Marcus Filly
It’s the idea that if you stretch your time horizon out long enough, that you can accomplish just, like, remarkable things. I was extremely engaged and inspired and enthusiastic about the sport, but the process of getting better physically was something that really lit me up, and that was my true passion. And I started at a time or an age where I didn’t feel like I had pressure to, like, get anywhere at any time, you know, soon. It was like, the best part of this was like, I’m going to be doing this for the next, you know, five years. And if in five years, I’m really, you know, I’ve continuing to get better, like, that’s what is a win for me. So I kind of, you know, within those.

Marcus Filly
That longer time horizon, I had short term goals and things that I tried to push myself to do, and that certainly helps. However, knowing that I had time to do something or that, you know, this was gonna be a long process gave me enough, like, space to really develop into the athlete that I could be. And I had this, like, the culmination of my career in 2016, at the last CrossFit Games that I competed at, you know, my placement was very good, but what I felt more than my placement was like, I just delivered the best package of Marcus as an athlete on the competition floor. That I’ve ever done in my entire career. And it’s because of the last, really five years of work to build to this point that I could even have a chance to do that.

Marcus Filly
And so that’s sort of like much of the way that all my, like, the true success in business has come. It’s like, you know, yeah, you want to make sales, yeah. You want to push revenue. Yeah. You want to have, you know, your metrics climbing, and everyone would love to hockey stick their business growth. However, it’s like, if you can just be slow and steady and make those 1% improvements on a routine cadence, then, gosh, five years from now, ten years from now, you stand to have something that is really valuable, a lot of enterprise value. And, you know, and this, the solidity or the stability of, you know, hey, a business that can operate, you know, over the long term, rather than something that was just great for a year and then burned out, because I know.

Logan Shinholser
Like, a lot of it in the CrossFit world, I mean, every day is intense. So I guess for you, now that you have pivoted away from CrossFit, you still have a lot of the same movements. So it’s a lot of similar maybe, outcomes, but it’s a different methodology. So can you talk a bit more about what is functional bodybuilding compared to what we all see on tv as CrossFit?

Marcus Filly
Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, CrossFit as a method was founded on some core principles, one of which is the constant variance principle. You know, do something new each time that you train. You know, to a certain extent, not like forever. Like, they repeat workouts from time to time, but take a core set of, let’s say it’s 50 exercises, and put them together in unique combinations each day. So there’s a variance component, there’s a functional component. So they define functional a particular way. But essentially, you know, the reputation is like, you’re doing movements that show up in life. You’re doing compound exercises, not isolation movements. So think pull up, not bicep curl. So we got the variance. We’re going to constantly vary these functional movements, and we’re going to perform them at the highest intensity possible.

Marcus Filly
And so the intensity portion of the CrossFit method and charter is, if you’re not doing it at the highest intensity, then I would argue you’re not doing CrossFit. Right? Someone would say, like, oh, you’re just doing CrossFit, Marcus. It’s like, well, actually, no, because CrossFit has never said perform x thing at a percentage of your maximum. They, they always say, perform this for your best effort possible. Today, do 20 115, nine of thrusters and pull ups as fast as you can. It wasn’t like, hey, it’s March 23 and today we’re doing 20 115, nine of thrusters and pull ups. And I want you to go at kind of a seven out of ten effort. That’s not part of the method. Now, I loved the variance component of CrossFit to a degree. Right? I love the functional movement component of CrossFit.

Marcus Filly
I, you know, thanks to my experience in CrossFit, I learned how to do muscle ups. I learned how to walk on my hands. I learned how to do pistols. I learned how to snatch, clean and jerk, you know, and perform all of the other power lifts that I had done for years prior to that with better technique, better form, I was exploring movement, and I love the high intensity aspect of it, too, in certain doses, because the truest high intensity that was ever done in my career was the CrossFit Games or CrossFit competition. If I did the same level of intensity at the CrossFit Games every day of the year, I would be obliterated as, like, a person. Like, limbs would literally start to fall off and break. So now bringing that down into the general population, gen pop.

Marcus Filly
So not athletes that are competing in the pinnacle of the sport, not your NFL, you know, starting, you know, roster more of like your pickup flag football team on the weekend of people who have real jobs and aren’t training and maybe, you know, don’t have the best fitness and nutrition and sleep and you name it. That is what I had to start thinking about when it came to CrossFit was like, how do I take these, distill these principles into something that works for me for the long haul if I’m not going to be competing and really works for a lot of people. And what was interesting was that in the affiliate, the CrossFit gym around the world, you saw a lot of good coaches taking CrossFit and scaling it because this is also part of the charters. Like, it’s universally scalable.

Marcus Filly
But they were scaling it in a way which was leveraging training principles that were not technically CrossFit, but they were just ways of, hey, how do I make this more accessible and help people progress and feel good and get stronger? And you started people doing, you started seeing coaches implement more bodybuilding work, you know, work and strength training principles with lifting prescriptions that were not go for a max every day. And they were doing, you know, like, as we got better in the sport, we realized that there’s methods that can translate down into training for these movements and for fitness, and people were doing them in the affiliates. So it was like this was happening already. Best practices were nothing. Come in, do the workout, you know, as fast as you can, and then leave.

Marcus Filly
It was, come in, do some focused mobility, do some structured strength training, maybe do some accessory strength training, then do a conditioning workout that’s like a metcon, but it’s got some. So it was all happening. And, and truthfully, I was working in the trenches for a number of years, adapting, you know, the, like, the original CrossFit methods that I saw on CrossFit.com. And I was adapting it for my audience and giving people strength and conditioning programs that had bodybuilding and CrossFit mixed together. And eventually, that is what I do today is, I call it functional bodybuilding. And it’s really a hybrid of, you know, CrossFit methods, bodybuilding methods, strength and conditioning principles that have been tried and true for decades that I used when I was in college as a d one athlete.

Marcus Filly
And it’s like, yeah, we’re doing it all together with the idea that the highest level of intensity that you can do on any given thing is not necessary to see improvement. And it can be counter productive to long term, sustainable health, fitness, and longevity. And when it came, you know, time for me to quit my career or retiree, I realized that’s what mattered. I didn’t, I didn’t need to win points this year or this weekend in the sport. I needed to feel awesome. I needed to show up for my family. I needed to be able to focus on my business. And I didn’t want to feel like I had just been punched in the gut last, you know, at 06:00 a.m.

Marcus Filly
In the morning at my workout and then kind of drag myself to my desk and try and figure out how to do my life.

Logan Shinholser
Yeah. And I think what’s interesting about when you’re talking about all this and you’re describing is I’m thinking back to, like, my business journey, but also my CrossFit journey, where, you know, when you’re describing Fran, which for everyone out there is that workout, he’s talking about the 20, 115, nine. Every time I’ve done that workout, I haven’t done it in years. Cause I’ve, like, kind of put my ego to the side, but, like, I then spend 20 minutes waiting around to then throw up. So it’s like, it’s it. And it happens every single time. And I’m at this place now where I’m like, there’s no way that, like, I would ever do that workout before work because then I’m coming into work with all of that. But with business, it’s a lot of that. Where your journey of this is all.

Logan Shinholser
You come out of the gates super hot, super fast. You’re trying to do everything all at once in business, really just like not knowing how reckless it can be. And then as you mature, you start to realize, like, let’s slow it down. We can go intense on certain things, but there’s a lot of things that we don’t need to go 150% every single day. And if we just slow it down, we’re actually going to be able to go a lot further, a lot longer, versus just trying to like, you know, throw caution to the wind and see what can come of it. If we just go really hard for.

Marcus Filly
75 days, somebody who’s getting into business or somebody who’s getting into fitness, who listens to the narrative that you got to go hard, super hard, if you want to get anywhere, if you want to break through, you got to just go full, like, you gotta ten x everything. You gotta grant cardonet, you gotta, you know, you gotta go high intensity, like every day. Use 75 hard that. Not 75, 365 hard. Like, if somebody’s caught up in that narrative, which it’s easy to get caught up in, and hear people say that, then it’s no fault to them for just following through. Cause that’s what they believe is true. It’s like, we’re here to educate people that there’s a different way of thinking about it. And it’s like the extended time horizon. How is this going to play out over decade?

Marcus Filly
Over a decade, not just over months. And then once people hear that, help them align to a systematic approach to how to do this. That’s not to say you can’t, you shouldn’t ten x something. It’s like, yeah, like, even if you’re playing the long game and your marketing is just not working, like ten x ing, your marketing is a great strategy to start to figure out what can work, what sticks, and what’s actually landing for your audience. You know, if you just keep putting out one Instagram post every three weeks and you’re like, man, my Instagram’s not growing. It’s like, that’s not playing the sustainable long game.

Marcus Filly
That’s just bad business practice, you know, but waking up and doing 20 hours days for you know, 75 days in a row, barely sleeping, not taking care of yourself, physically, not eating well, you know, not having relationships. Like, you might make it pretty far in 75 days with your business, but then the next 75 days, you might pretty much burn out and not produce anything and all of that, you know, at the end of those 150 cumulative days, the person who only worked a twelve or 14 hours day is way surpassing you because they put in 150 consecutive days, whereas you put in 75 and then fell off.

Logan Shinholser
So while we all agree that there’s a lot of overlap between fitness and running a strong business, I actually wanted to know from Marcus, what is that direct correlation?

Marcus Filly
Sure. Yeah. I mean, for me, the biggest aspect of it, and I could speak to, like, the health benefits and the energy benefits and the mental clarity, which I’m happy to talk about, but fitness is and building a strong muscular body, and I’m not talking like, we’re building muscle to, like, look a particular way. Muscle is a proxy for, like, you know, just sort of the strength and effort and quality of your training and the consistency.

Marcus Filly
It’s like the person who has more muscle, you know, exogenous hormones and, like, you know, really banned substances aside, like, if we’re all playing on a level playing field and I see this person has more muscle than the next person, and they’re both strength training, then I’m like, yes, this person has, maybe they have a more superior program, but more likely they’re just working harder, they’re bringing more effort, they’re more consistent, they’re doing more of the right things. And the character and the strength of mind, spirit, and body that goes with that is remarkable. I mean, it’s why people who are, you know, maybe have a while. You see a lot of people in business, you know, reference their sports background or their upbringing in athletics as like, it gave me, you know, it taught me work ethic. It taught me like, it taught.

Marcus Filly
It teaches work ethic. It teaches also the confidence that comes from taking on a hard pursuit physically and being successful, and seeing that the only way I can make it to this physical pursuit is through repeated, consistent efforts. Like, nobody builds a great physique in three months. They build it over a lifetime. And so to me, that is really where fitness and being in the traits from fitness carry over into entrepreneurship. So much is like when you commit yourself to your physical health and your physical fitness, you’re building traits that have direct carryover to what you do as an entrepreneur. And then with all that said, yes, I started out by saying, like, well, when you move your body and you’re expending more energy through physical exertion, there is hormonal benefits, there’s neurotransmitter benefits. People who exercise are less depressed.

Marcus Filly
Well, a less depressed CEO is somebody who’s probably going to be able to show up and better at engaging with other people in the company and leading. Right. If they’re depressed or if they have suppressed serotonin levels, dopamine levels in their brain, like, they’re not as effective as leaders. Of course, the cardiorespiratory and the other health benefits, you’re going to have a translation to likely fewer sick days in your year. So it’s like, hey, how did your year go? As an entrepreneur, I know people that have, like, chronic infections. They are just sick all the time and they might miss eight weeks a year being ill or just have eight to twelve weeks a year where they just can’t perform at their best because they’re just foggy and mentally, you know, like this mental fog from being sick.

Marcus Filly
And if that’s a quarter to, you know, a 6th of your entire calendar year, and that happens year after year, you’re falling behind for somebody who, you know, doesn’t, you know, the people that say, like, I never get sick, well, that’s not necessarily, I mean, that’s not always just a random occurrence. If you strengthen your immune system through positive health behaviors that can. Absolutely. By eating well, that’s the number one thing that you can do to improve your immune function and resilience. But also movement, cardio respiratory, you know, fitness, strength training, all these things can, so long as you don’t push it so hard that you’re like, beating down your immune system. Another reason why going hard, you know, super hard in the gym all the time can be a pro, can be problematic because then you’re now more vulnerable to illness.

Marcus Filly
So it’s like, get more quality, you know, like days of the year back by not being sick, you know, have better mental acuity and, like, emotional, psychological well being where you feel confident and you don’t feel like, because a depressed individual is somebody who is going to, like, have greater, like, maybe higher levels of anxiety and more doubt and fear and or doubt in themselves. And you want to be like, in a position where I’m like, I’m confident, you know, I move towards the fear because I believe I can take it on because business is scary, it’s uncertain, right. I don’t want to be, I want to feel good each day. I don’t want to feel hungover and sick, right? And all of that is, like, coming from good health and wellness behaviors. And you’re like, well, I don’t need all that stuff.

Marcus Filly
I’m just gonna, like, grind it out for 20 hours a day and just gonna grind and grind. It’s like, your 20 hours are less effective than my 10 hours because I am sharp. I’m never sick. I can get way more done in a short amount of time. And it happens to because I train my body into physical health. Plus, all the years of training have given me the traits and the confidence on how to stick to a plan, how to follow through, how to be disciplined. And it’s like, okay, you’re winning. And you can have people who are great entrepreneurs who are not in shape and who are, you know, they don’t take their health seriously. But take Mr. Beast as a great example.

Marcus Filly
It’s like, here’s a guy who built this mega empire, and, you know, it was like, maybe 18 months ago, he was like, I realized that I was, like, basically fat and out of shape. I, like, had no muscle. And did he have a successful business at the time? Absolutely. The biggest social media business in the world. Right. But then he’s like, I’m going to start getting in shape. It’s like, fast forward 18 months. Ask him, like, are you a better entrepreneur than you were when you were out of shape? It’s relative improvements upon what you already bring to the table. So you might be killing it out there, and you’re like, I don’t. I don’t care. I don’t focus on my diet. I barely work out, and I’m just crushing it. It’s like, imagine what you could do if you did.

Marcus Filly
You could be, you know, untouchable.

Logan Shinholser
Yeah. It’s funny because it’s like, this is already hard enough as it is. Like, entrepreneurship. It’s. It’s an infinite game. There’s no end. You finally made it. There’s no rules. So you’re kind of just figuring it out as you go. So why make it harder on yourself than it already is? Because you’re going to mess up. You’re going to fail. Don’t do it where every day at 02:00 you’re ready for a nap because you put the wrong stuff into your body. And one of the things that you talked about, I heard before was just with this idea of fitness you were talking about, well, just because you go and just burn off the calories on the treadmill, that’s not the same as going and actually building muscle mass.

Logan Shinholser
So when it comes to the actual exercises and what kind of workouts you’re doing, that also makes an impact into how you’re showing up. So can you talk a bit about, like, it was a. It was a big unlock for me when you were discussing, like, the more muscle mass you have, the better off you’re going to be as a whole. So can you talk a bit about that?

Marcus Filly
My. I guess thesis statement here is, you know, when you go to the gym and you train, there should be a purpose behind it. Training is not the same as just going to burn calories, which is unfortunately what the health and fitness and the diet culture has fed to a lot of people. It’s like, the only reason to engage in fitness is to burn calories so that you don’t have, you can lose weight. And while there’s some truth to that underlying, like, the whole method and system of, like, thinking that I’m talking about, what’s really, what really should be the case is that, you know, when you step in the gym, you should have a purpose of getting stronger, building muscle, or improving your cardiovascular fitness or your cardio measurably. Like, did you increase the weight on the bar? Did you grow muscle?

Marcus Filly
Did you simulate muscle growth? And did you actually push your Vo two max? Which is a term people have heard, but it’s a. It’s generally a measurement of your, like, cardiorespiratory capacity. Did you move your Vo two max up? And if you’re not doing one of those things, then you’re just in their kind of manufacturing movements and workouts and combinations to burn calories. And the problem with the calorie burn concept is that in a great scenario, like, and I’m talking about for most people, a good to great scenario is five days a week in the gym for an hour. That’s 5 hours of close to whatever it is, 150 hours in a week that exist. So that’s a fraction of the time that you exist is in the gym.

Marcus Filly
So there’s all these other hours where your body is burning energy, and we want to maximize how much energy you burn in the 145 hours that you’re not in the gym. Rather than think about how do I maximize the energy that I burn in the 5 hours that I’m in the gym? And the way that you maximize the out. Like, the total energy that you burn throughout a week is by having more muscle, being a more lean individual, eating better quality food, and having more activity that you do that’s not gym related. So people who walk 10,000 steps a day and work out three times a week have a much better chance at losing body fat than the person who works out five times a week really hard, but only walks two to 4000 steps a day.

Marcus Filly
And so it’s like, how do we change this, this thought process? So it’s going to the gym. Have structured training to build strength, to build muscle, to build your Vo two max. Focus on that, bring enough effort to move the needle on this, on these health and fitness metrics, and then the rest of your day, get in a little bit more activity. Walk more, drive less, sit less, eat more high quality food, which also burns more calories and impacts your calorie intake. So that is kind of like the primary, you know, model that I want people to try and shift their thinking to. And if you do that, you think when you leave the gym, you used to equate leaving the gym with a good sweat as a sign of success.

Marcus Filly
Like, oh, I got a good sweat and I burned a lot of calories. I was crushed. The cardio. Today, I’m not saying that getting on the elliptical and doing treadmill is not beneficial. It is, absolutely. I want you getting that in, but I want you also spending the time in the gym pushing against resistance, getting weights into your hands, making them heavier than last time, building that muscle, because a muscular lean frame is one that’s going to burn more energy in the other 23 hours of your day than one that did a ton of cardio sweat. And then, you know, is kind of this little smoldering, slow burn fire for the rest of the day.

Logan Shinholser
To me, it seems like a lot of the health and fitness programs out there are really focused on people that spend an hour in the gym and then just work a desk job all day. So I want to know for Marcus, with contractors who are typically on their feet for eight to 10 hours a day, what sort of training and exercise programs and thought processes should they be focusing on?

Marcus Filly
Great question and something that I haven’t thought about a lot. However, now I just, it just seems so clear to me that if you’re in that situation, your activity level is quite high already and you should absolutely not be thinking about how do I leverage time in the gym to burn more energy and burn more calories? If Im in that situation, then the biggest levers that youre going to be able to pull in order to improve your health and fitness outcomes, or maybe its your body composition maybe you just want to look good. And I hate to throw out this stereotype, but im thinking of people working on a job site, contractors or laborers that are just overweight despite how much movement that they’re doing.

Marcus Filly
You know, you got, you know, somebody who’s very overweight, but here they are moving for 8 hours a day, you know, on the job sites, like, doesn’t compute. Well, what are the things that they’re potentially missing? Well, number one, it is. I would think that jobs like that are because of, you know, yeah, there’s a lot of repeated tasks, but there’s, there is the physical toll that takes on a body over the years is a lot. And so the work that you would do in the gym is about building great functional strength. So strength combined with, you know, we term it mobility, or like, the ability to move freely under control through large ranges of motion of all of your joints.

Marcus Filly
You know, somebody like, somebody who’s working a contracting job or is, you know, moving a lot on the site for eight to 10 hours. And then I bring them into the gym and I say, okay, let’s do a functional assessment. And they can’t touch their toes because they have really tight hamstrings or they have poor hip mechanics. That is, that screams to me real problems. That person has a high likelihood of getting injured on the job site because they lack functional strength and range in their hips. And we could do that for their entire body. You know, your career, you know, last thing you want is to go on to. It has to go on to disability because you know, you hurt your back or you hurt your shoulder.

Marcus Filly
So the time spent in the gym is about getting strong through big ranges of motion, doing deep squats, you know, learning how to do an RDL well, where you lengthen the, you know, the muscles along the back of your legs, learning how to do, you know, full range of motion, pull ups and bench presses to, like, open up your shoulders and create health and strength in your upper back. Those types of things would be extremely valuable, and they would make the movements that you’re doing on the job feel even more easeful and effortless because now what you’ve done in the gym has kind of prepared you for anything that you might do there. And then the second biggest thing is nutrition, because it is so easy to out eat your training. Like, you can’t out train or out work on the job site.

Marcus Filly
A bad diet, it’s. It’s. It’s so remarkable when people start to actually investigate these things how easy it is to just like, yeah, I’m moving 10 hours a day, I burn a ton of calories and I’m still putting on body fat. It’s like because if you go, and I’m not saying that this is the mistake people are making, but if we go to the extreme, you can go to a drive through to get breakfast or lunch at a fast food joint. You can order a standard meal on the menu, like with maybe the larger sizes, you can get a large soft drink and then you can throw in like one of the desserts and you could easily put away 2500 calories in one sitting. And it not even really feel like that was a big meal.

Marcus Filly
Whereas if you learned a little bit about nutrition, you started to prioritize bringing your own lunch with the right foods in it. Or you just started to make simple food swaps. You know, you could suddenly see somebody whos putting in all the energy or sorry, outputting all the energy at their work. Plus theyre doing the functional strength stuff three to four times a week for like an hour. And then they make that, those switches on their food and suddenly just body fat and weight just melts off of them, which is great for their health and longevity. Theyre going to improve all their health markers. Theyre not going to have metabolic syndrome and, you know, they’re not going to be in the overweight obese category.

Marcus Filly
Their blood pressure, their insulin sensitivity, their diabetes markers, all those things are going to go way down in a positive direction. But they’re also going to feel confident because they’re going to start looking better and feeling like, oh, I am not, I’m not carrying around this extra, you know, amount of weight around my midsection, around my back or my love handles. And it was, and it wasn’t like there’s just such a low hanging fruit there to clean up nutrition. When you’re already somebody who’s moving a ton, it’s like when I see somebody who moves a lot and is overweight, I’m like, oh, my gosh, like we just pull like a nutrition lever. This thing is going to go crazy. Whereas you got people who sit all day, they get less than 2000 steps a day and they only are training three days a week.

Marcus Filly
It’s like they don’t have a lot of, they’re not burning a lot. So to like make a big nutrition shift and see a huge change is going to be pretty hard, because they don’t have that like added activity level that somebody who’s working a manual labor job does.

Logan Shinholser
Marcus is huge on nutrition. So I asked him, what are some of those nutritional levers that we can pull that makes a big impact into getting in better shape and better business shape?

Marcus Filly
Yeah. Well, when it comes to food and it comes to getting started, it is about. It’s a science of addition, not subtraction. You know, in my. In my opinion. Or it’s a. It’s a mathematical kind of equation of. Or addition rather than subtraction. There’s too much diet, culture, and nutrition stuff out there that says, stop eating this, stop eating that, stop eating this, stop eating that. And it’s a hard way to get people started because people have routines, they have habits, and you take it away, and I. Man, it’s like, I don’t want to give that up right now. That feels good to me. Or maybe it doesn’t feel good, but it’s all I know, and I’m addicted to it. There’s some biological, psychological response to it. Hey, don’t take away my thing.

Marcus Filly
So adding something is a great way to indirectly get people to lessen something and just take this very simple example. It’s like, you know, hey, if you want to. You want to have it, you really want to have a donut? Okay, if you. If you said, okay, have the doughnut. But first I want you to have these three apples. Just eat these three apples, you know, and pick any apple you like, but you got to eat three of them. They’re. They’re kind of substantial. It’s like, okay, eat the three apples. Okay, now go have whatever donut you want. And maybe the first time they. They go eat the whole doughnut. Do it every day, and they have, okay, have two pieces of fruit, and, you know, and then go eat the donut. And pretty soon they’re just like, man, I’m just kind of full.

Marcus Filly
Like, I just ate a bunch of apples, and I drank this, you know, water or this diet. Diet beverage or whatever, you know, something to fill them up that’s no calories. They’re like, I don’t really want the donut. You know, I’m only gonna have a little bite of it. That’s just a very simple example of this. But where we try. And that’s not the first place we start. The place that we start with people is like, hey, start your meal with protein, or make sure that each meal has some protein in it. And we have to teach people what that looks like. What does it look like to get you throughout 30 to 40? It could be even as much as 50 grams.

Marcus Filly
But what does it look like to get 30 to 50 grams of protein at every meal, starting with breakfast each day? Because people who are in this cycle of, like, overeating, they tend to. This is very common. They tend to be breakfast skippers. You know, they eat a little later in the morning, or they, you know, they just start their day with, like, an energy drink or a coffee and, you know, maybe a pastry or something like that. Not a. Not a substantial meal, but a decent, you know, some calories. And then they get to lunch. They have a big meal because now they’re really hungry because they haven’t eaten anything since dinner last night.

Marcus Filly
Usually they just drank a bunch of caffeine and sugar, and then by the time they work the rest of the day and then they get home, they’re also starving. Maybe they have a, you know, a alcoholic beverage, and then it goes into eating, and then they have some snacks after dinner, and then they just load up on a lot of food and calories at night, which then makes them wake up the next morning feeling like, I’m not full. I just need to, like, you know, I need a cigarette and a coffee, and I’m good to go. And then they get, you know, to the next stage. And it’s just a bit. It’s a vicious cycle. So we say, okay, you got to get protein into your system early in the day. So we start with just, you got to have breakfast.

Marcus Filly
It’s got to be 30 to 50 grams of protein. What does that look like? What the hell is that? I don’t know. Just have a protein shake. If you want to start with, like, wake up. Instead of having just coffee or just the energy drink, have a, you know, protein shake with two scoops of protein and water or milk, that’s fine. You know, maybe we graduate them over time to, hey, have two hard boiled eggs and, you know, a couple strips of bacon and some chicken. Or you have a big old bowl of, you know, yogurt, greek yogurt with some protein mixed into it. Or you have, you start to, like, tea to, oh, you could have, you know, a whole two cups of egg whites scrambled together with a little bit of cheese that you like. Boom.

Marcus Filly
And they start to figure out, hey, I can have 50 grams of protein this way. Now, protein is where we start because protein is such a valuable macronutrient for everybody but somebody who’s just getting into the dieting or nutrition world, number one, because it’s highly satiating. It makes you feel full. If you eat equal amounts of protein and equal amounts of fat and equal amounts of carbs. Generally, the protein is always going to fill you up more. It takes a little bit longer to digest. It sends signals, once it’s in your digestive system, back to your brain, through hormones, through, you know, neurotransmitters. Hey, I’m full. You don’t need to eat more. And it will help you sustain that fullness and that energy for longer. So you’re like, no, it’s not like an hour later where you’re like, I need some more, right?

Marcus Filly
It’s like everyone’s had the experience, like, I have a, you know, bite of a candy bar or have a sugary drink in an hour, I need something else, you know, and then you need something else. You need something else. Protein helps you sustain and feel, you know, full for longer. Number two, protein. When you ingest protein, enough of it, let’s say 50 grams of protein, you eat that, it starts building muscle, right? Like that is, it’s having enough protein in your bloodstream. You know, it gets broken down into amino acids. Once you have enough amino acids in your bloodstream, your body kicks on this thing called protein synthesis. Muscle protein synthesis, that’s building muscle. And, you know, if you’re doing that throughout your day, having protein at each meal, then guess what?

Marcus Filly
You’re building the muscle tissue that you want to have, making it more active so that you’re burning more calories, and so that you’re burning more calories at rest. So we want protein for its muscle building potential, for its satiation helps to reduce cravings later in the day. Right. And the other thing that’s kind of nuanced is, like, when you eat protein, because of the way protein is structured as a molecule, it’s, like, costly to break it down, right? You have to, like, it’s like, if, you know, the analogy would be like, you know, we’re on the contractor example. It’s like if you had to go dig a hole to plant the tree in the landscaping project and it was soft soil, you would just, you know, it’d be an easy hole to dig. You’re hoping that it’s a soft soil, not clay. Like concrete.

Marcus Filly
Like, you’re going to have to really work your ass off. Protein is kind of like the clay concrete. When you, when you eat protein, your body has to work hard to break it down and to get energy out of it. You’re going to get the energy out of it, but you’re going to have to put in a little bit more than if you eat the carbohydrate, which is more like the soft soil where it’s like, I just put this in and it goes right into my body without much effort, and I get all the calories from it, whereas the protein, I only got a portion of the calories from it because I had to work so hard to get it out.

Marcus Filly
So it’s like if you’re going to choose a food to eat protein so that you’re putting in a little bit more energy to get the same thing out. And so we got fullness, we’ve got muscle building, and then we’ve got this sort of like the energy cost of breaking it down. And so if that’s where I start with people, it’s like, hey, let’s just put in the protein at each of your meals. Prioritize the first meal of the day so that you can start your day and you can break this cycle of getting to dinner and into the late night of snacking where you’re, where it’s so easy for people to just consume thousands of calories without even really thinking about it.

Marcus Filly
And this is one habit that starts to break that cycle and one attention of like, I’m going to add this to every meal. Yeah, you can go have your whatever, but make sure you add in your 50 grams of protein to each meal. And they’re like, what does that look like? It’s like, okay, let’s just do a quick Google search. You know, go to chat. GPT. Chat GPT. I need 40 grams of protein. Give me a list of 20 things that I can have. Boom, you’re done. Like, you have it. You’re like, oh, greek yogurt, you know, protein shake, chicken breast. Right? Like pulled pork, like, whatever. Like, you could think of a bunch of different examples, but it’s a great place to start.

Marcus Filly
And then over time, we can even make that better with other additions and eventually some swaps or subtractions of things that are no longer serving you. And you’re like, gosh, you know, I’m still eating that donut every day. I don’t even need that anymore. What’s like a better option? I’m going to start going with this thing.

Logan Shinholser
All this sounds great, but where does rest and recovery come into the quality of your day to day life?

Marcus Filly
Sure, yeah. I mean, I think for the rest and recovery part of this, I don’t imagine that this group that we’re speaking to wants to start to like, go through the added steps of doing, you know, soft tissue work and mobility and, you know, getting into all the biohacking and things like that. But the best free resource that we have for recovery is your sleep. And I think it’s important to take it one step further than just, like, we got to get sleep. It’s like, we got to improve the quality of our sleep first before we, like, we have to at least address that. There’s a quality and a quantity issue going on with sleep. People that are not giving themselves enough time to sleep, that is something that we do want to address.

Marcus Filly
But in the same way were talking about, like, food, it’s like, you know, the addition versus subtraction thing, it’s like when you tell somebody, hey, you got to go sleep more. What are you doing? You’re taking away waking hours from them. Like, you tell me to go to bed at eight, but from eight to ten is like, when I have, like, the most fulfillment in my day. I get to hang out with my wife, I get to hang out with my, you know, my husband, I get to hang out with my kid. I get to watch my show, whatever they do. And they’re like, I’m not feeling my best physically, and my health isn’t the best. They can’t see the benefit. You know, they can’t imagine what the benefit will look like with those two extra hours of sleep.

Marcus Filly
All they know right now is that you just took away an hour of their, you know, their best hours of the day, where they get to mentally check out and watch Netflix. So I. I start with, like, talking about quality. It’s like, okay, well, I don’t want to take away that thing, but I want to start you on a path towards getting better quality sleep so that if you’re only getting 6 hours, it’s like, you know, the best 6 hours you can get. And so I might start with, you know, and the things that increase sleep quality that people have the ability to change is. You already mentioned it, like, alcohol intake.

Marcus Filly
So, again, that could be something where you, like, don’t want to tell somebody to stop drinking alcohol because that’s, like, their favorite part of the day is their, you know, whatever it’s like. But if they’re coming home and they’re having three glasses of wine or three beers, you say, hey, what if we, like, cut that down to, like, two or one during the Monday through Friday or the, you know, Sunday through Thursday, and then, yeah, go back to your normal weekend amount. But it’s like, give them a chance to feel what higher quality sleep looks like. Or you’re like, you get them bought in on, like, hey, during these four work nights of the week, just. Just cut out the booze. Then let’s try and maximize your sleep quality. Getting rid of booze is going to vastly improve the quality of people’s sleep.

Marcus Filly
The second thing that’s going to vastly improve the quality of people’s sleep is cutting their eating window a little bit further away from sleep time. So if bedtime is going to be 10:00 p.m. Then stop eating at 08:00 p.m. Or 07:00 p.m. If possible, and give yourself a two to three hour buffer between when you fall asleep. And so that’s the food that you’ve just had can pass, you know, a big portion of your digestive system. And now you don’t have a lot of, like, elevated heart rate and things where you’re, like, trying to digest food, and there’s a lot going on that can disrupt the quality of your sleep. So those are two things that you can start to just move. It’s like, hey, you don’t have to do this.

Marcus Filly
You don’t have to cut it out completely, but just move the time windows or maybe lessen the quantity of alcohol here and, you know, keep it over here.

Logan Shinholser
We all know that change can be difficult. So I asked Marcus if you were just getting started or maybe getting started for the 12th time on this fitness journey, where should you start to make sure that you’re actually sustainable with what you’re doing?

Marcus Filly
It’s this fine line between, like, I value things like, 75 hard because in some respects, because it’s difficult for people to get excited about doing, like, the bare minimum, you know, it’s like, I know that if somebody is not working out and they’re only walking 3000 steps a day, that if they just focused on committing to moving 8000 steps a day, no exercise on top of that, no structured workouts, they would get better. But you tell somebody to do that and they’re like, ugh. Like, I’m so bad. Like, I’m so bad off that, like, that’s like, the only, that’s the only thing. I’m like, it’s not even enough to get them motivated to start. Whereas if they’re like, hey, do the 75 hard thing, they’re like, yeah, I’m gonna really crush this thing.

Marcus Filly
And it gets them fired up to go, then there’s value in it. So I’m always striking this balance between, like, what’s the minimal effective dose. And what’s a dose that gets somebody kind of, like, feeling like, yeah, I’m making a. I’m going to move the needle. Cause if you start walking 8000 steps a day, that’s going to make you better, but it’s going to be a slow change. Whereas if you go 75 hard after day 20, you might be seeing some, like, pretty substantial results. Cause you went from doing nothing to doing 245 minutes workouts a day, being outdoors for 45 minutes a day, you know, doing all the, like, not, you know, doing something nutritionally like that, of course it’s going to move the needle. If the question is whether that’s sustainable, that’s the other dark side of 75 hard.

Marcus Filly
So as far as getting started, I say three days a week of resistance training. Like, let’s try and make room for that. You know, get a gym membership, go in, spend the money on a personal trainer to just walk you through the basics. Or if you’ve done some training in the past, you feel comfortable with weights. Join an online, like, get an online training program that you can follow with an app on your phone like the one that we offer.

Marcus Filly
There’s so many good programs out there that have really good software and tech where you can more or less, like, guide yourself through a pretty high quality fitness program now without having to pay too much money or, you know, get a few kettlebells or dumbbells for the garage and just commit to a routine where you get out there, you know, three days a week and you’re lifting those things again, following whatever program that you want to get yourself access to, then. I love the concept of daily movement. So this, like, 75 hard, where it’s like, do a 45 minutes workout every day. It doesn’t have to be weights and something high intensity. It just, you got, like, even going for a walk or putting on a weighted pack, I think that is just an absolute great strategy.

Marcus Filly
And for people, I say walking 45 minutes a day, like, in a, if you could do it uninterrupted, great. If you just need to break it up into 15 minutes walks, also great. And to give that person some more of motivation, it’s like, oh, we’re just walking. It’s like, put a weighted pack on. Literally get yourself a 20 to 30 pound, 40 pound backpack or weight vest or some type of weighted thing, put it on your body, and that’s going to elevate your intensity of this very simple thing called walking. And then add in the protein at breakfast and try and get 30 to 50 grams of protein at every meal each day. Make that the first part of your meal that you eat.

Marcus Filly
And then let’s just start there for, you know, a month, and we’ll talk about how you’re feeling at that point. And if you are compliant with that 90% of the time, meaning 90% of days, you do all those things, I can. I can almost guarantee that at the date, at day 30, you’re going to be like, cool. What’s next? I’m ready for something more.

Logan Shinholser
If you enjoyed that episode with Marcus Filly and you want to learn more about him and functional bodybuilding, we’ll go ahead and put his information down below in either the show notes or the YouTube video to check him out. I will say the more that you are exposed to his own Instagram account, the more that he will give you little tips and tricks that are actually quite easy to follow throughout your day that just make you a better, healthier person. So check it out in the show notes, because we’re all about making sure that we are functioning the best versions of ourselves in business holistically. We’ll see you next time.