Aaron Alexander | How to Improve Your Health With Optimal Alignment From the Founder of The Align Method

Written By Kristel Bauer

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This episode will help us better understand the ‘Align Method’ as our guest Aaron Alexander shares his insights on being healthier for the long term through better movement practices. Listen in to learn principles and techniques that you can use in your workouts and other physical activities.

Key Takeaways From This Episode

  • What is ‘The Align Method’?

  • Why is sitting on the ground good for you?

  • 2 things to practice in every workout

  • How touch is great for your health

Disclaimer: All information and views shared on the Live Greatly podcast & the Live greatly website are purely the opinions of the authors, and are not intended to provide medical advice or treatment recommendations. The contents of this podcast & website are intended for informational and educational purposes only. Always seek the guidance of your physician or other qualified health professional when you have any questions regarding your specific health, changes to diet and exercise, or any medical conditions.

Resources Mentioned In This Episode

 

About Aaron Alexander

Aaron Alexander is a renowned Movement Coach and is the author of The Align Method. He helps people improve their posture and physical health by using movement techniques inspired by yoga, martial, arts, chiropractic skills, and more. His clients include Hollywood celebrities like Usher, Gerard Butler, and David Blane, Olympic/professional athletes Lance Armstrong, and just about every person in between. Aaron is also the host of the top-rated podcast, The Align Method. The podcast has welcomed big names like Dr. Will Cole, Jim Kwik, Dr. Caroline Leaf, Wim Hof, and more.

Connect with Aaron

 

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Kristel Bauer, the Founder of Live Greatly, is on a mission to help people thrive personally and professionally. She is a corporate wellness expert, Integrative Medicine Fellow, Keynote Speaker, TEDx speaker & Physician Assistant experienced in Integrative Psychiatry and Functional Medicine. 

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Episode Transcript

Aaron: (Teaser)

If your central column, your central nervous system, your spine, your axial skeleton. If that thing is twisted, turned, torqued out of alignment out of neutrality, then your body literally doesn't trust you to produce power. So it will make you less strong. 

Kristel: (Guest’s Introduction)

If you're interested in how alignment and posture can impact your health and wellbeing.

You're going to learn a lot from today's episode with Aaron Alexander. Aaron is a celebrity movement coach, the founder of the Aligned Method, and he helps his clients improve posture to achieve total body alignment, improved strength and achieve peak performance. Aaron’s worked with people like Usher and Lance Armstrong.

He also is the host of the podcast, The Aligned Method, and he has a new book The Aligned Method as well. 

We're going to be talking a lot about what does proper posture look like? How can you work out safely? How can you support yourself when you're sitting, when you're standing and all the different things that you do throughout the day.

I'm really, really excited about this episode. Let's jump right into it and welcome Aaron to the show.

I'm so happy to have you here, Aaron. Thanks for taking some time with me today.

Aaron:

Thank you for having me Kristel. 

Kristel: 

My pleasure. Okay. So to start, you are doing some really, really cool stuff. I love fitness, and alignment's a huge thing. I'm really excited to chat with you about health and fitness and your new book and all that good stuff. But to get started, I would love for you just to share a little bit about yourself. What's currently getting you really excited? And what are you up to these days? 

Aaron:
Currently So I just moved to Austin, Texas, just like in June.

So a few months ago. And I think what's getting me really excited right now is I'm kind of like addicted to really any sensation of progress or at least the illusion thereof. So the progress that I'm experiencing right now is getting into jumping off of a diving board. You go to this place called Barton Springs.

And so I have some friends that are like, they're pretty excellent divers and acrobats. And they're kind of like showing me some things I'm terrible, but they're showing me some things. So that's something to me like just being comfortable upside down. That's a great thing, getting a hold of my mind, you know, so like meditation, you know, just being with stillness, mute with myself, not continually and like this aversion slash reaching out and pulling in and reaching out, pulling in, you know, so I think that's another interesting thing for me is just being more comfortable with stillness.

So jumping off a diving board being upside down and stillness are two things that I'm pretty into right now.

Kristel:

Very cool. I think that is one of the most unique answers that I've ever been given, the diving one. Really cool. Very, very cool and congrats on the move. And you also are, you have your book, The Align method, and that's your updated version and that did that just come out or is that coming out?

Aaron:

January 11th. 1/11/22. Hopefully it's similar for something. 

Kristel:
Very cool. Okay. So let's chat a little bit about that. Like you are a celebrity movement coach. What exactly does that mean? 

Aaron:

Sorry. Movement coach has kind of a cheesy thing. It's just, I happen to work with people in the film industry and different athletes and such.

So I mean, celebrities is the thing I think like PR people suggest, you know, and we have, I have that on the it's like people like to have to hear that, but I work with everybody and I do online programs and the book is for everybody. So it's kind of a variety of client that I work with. 

Kristel:

Gotcha. Okay. So what got you into the space is fitness space and alignment?

So I would just love a little like backstory. Like, was there any big event? Was it just something that you naturally gravitated to? 

Aaron:

I've always been really enamored by what the heck is going on, especially with like the mind-body relationship and that kind of stemmed. I think I started, I had kind of interesting childhood.

My dad got into drugs and kind of had some like instability in home as a teenager. So that was really interesting to get to see. And now my dad's playing really well and it's like this beautiful story. I include the whole like backstory in my book. And it's kind of like the original seed of really noticing that when I felt unsafe or unstable in this case of my home situation, what the by-product of that for me was packing on lots of muscular insulation onto my biological home.

And so I think that's just an interesting thing to look back on in retrospect, the way that our, the events in our lives inform the way that we produce ourselves at a cellular level, hormonal level and structural level and how our structure informs ourselves and vice versa. So that was kind of, I think the original seed of suddenly like becoming a bodybuilder, but like a strange young age then got into, you know, broke my body down, kind of destroyed myself in a lot of ways, just a lot of imbalanced training, which now I'm helping people understand how to be more balanced and working kind of like more integrative approach to movement, fitness and just being in your body, like, what does it mean to be in your body? It's that when it's a Rolfing setting, went to school for Rolfing and Boulder, Colorado Psychology and Hawaii, went to the University of Hawaii out there.

And want to massage squat Hawaii as well. And just been slowly building up the toolbox to help work with clients. I've always been done personal training since I was 16 and my first job at LA fitness. And it's just been a gradual trend of building the toolbox over the years. 

Kristel:

Wow. Okay. So did you do competitions and stuff for bodybuilding?

Was it something you did? 

Aaron:

Like I was prepping for one competition and then there was an issue with my age. I was 17 and you had to be 18 at least, and it was like a weird thing. And so I was prepping for a competition and you're like shaving my body down and getting a tan and all that stuff, but I never actually competed in a competition.

No. 

Kristel:

Okay. Gotcha. So then you said you broke your body. Was that through like using the wrong methods or were you also like, were you using like illegal drugs or like, things like that to, cause I know that's like a thing too. I've heard. I mean, as far as like, you know, trying to get build up muscle mass.

Aaron:

Yeah. Yeah. And there's a place for testosterone placement, things of the sort, but for me as a 16 year old kid, that wasn't the place, but no, it was just a lot of imbalanced training. So really focusing, and this is so common. This is not. I see it everywhere. Anytime I walk into any kind of 24 hour fitness or any kind of like traditional gym type setting, typically it's a lot of people kind of like working on the beach muscles.

So it's like, we don't even realize, and this is a metaphor for a lot of other things, but we, you know, we don't realize that we have a body in our back, you know, so it's like, okay, cool. I got like the abs got the bice. Now the booty gains trends, I got my glutes, my ass. So we have almost like anatomical idols that we worship.

We go deep into, uh, this tunnel vision of developing those parts, but there's a way to train, to make your body more adaptable and healthy and feel at ease. And so when the body is at ease through. Yeah. You could say centrating the joints or no balancing, just finding balance from your ankles, your knees, to your hips, through your spine, your shoulders, the body can start to relax into itself.

If you've ever done any kind of dance or maybe martial arts or boxing or anything of the sort, really any thing where your movement matters, which has everything. Because anytime you're having a conversation, it's about 58% of our communication. So it says Albert Mehrabian, which is a psychologist from the sixties. It comes from our body language and then 38% of our communication comes from the tone of our voice. And then there's like this last little bit, that's the actual words that we're using. So you're an athlete, right? No matter what you are, if you're a housewife, you’re a mom, if you work in an office, if you're whatever you do, you are an athlete.

Your physical body is what moves you through the world. It's what makes you money. It's what digests your food. It's what allows you to think clearly. And when there's, kaufmanni in the physical system, then that trickles into the way that you feel, the way that you think and the way that you perceive yourself.

So I know I'm kind of wandering off into other subjects, but I think this is an interesting thread of like, what is fitness? And ultimately fitness is just, what do you want to be fit for? You know? So first one needs to define where am I attempting to arrive? And then from there, so how many people even know where they want to arrive?

I said, within fitness, it's like, okay, where do I want to go? What are my goals? You know, and so my present goals and my goals for most people that I work with, and most of you, if you're with them long enough, eventually their goal becomes like, oh, I want to be able to play with my kids. You know, I wouldn't be able to play with my grandkids.

I want to be able to just run with it. Like someone throws a Frisbee. I want to be able to just run. Grab the Frisbee, throw it back. I'd like to be able to like be barefoot and not have to be dependent on orthotics or some type of weird superficial structure that allows this body to be normal, because at some point it was easy to just be in your body, you know?

And then we slowly start to accrue these patterns over the year. So a lot of my lens on physicality is a process of kind of almost like going backwards to go forward. 

Kristel:

Very cool. Okay. So the Aligned Method, I would love to just hear a little bit more about what that entails, but like I'm thinking just from like a functional perspective, something simple, and it's actually, it's not simple at all, but something like posture, like where our shoulders are placed, our neck placement, like when we're sitting, when we're standing all of these things, is that something that your method can help with?

Like if people do your method, will that help them in their day-to-day life, like have better posture. 

Aaron:

Yeah. The Aligned Method is more of a philosophy with practical techniques and principles. So it's like the Bruce Lee and various different other people have different thoughts about the idea of like having a methodology or a dogma of sorts.

And there's always going to be a limitation there. So I much more interested in understanding what are the fundamental principles that are consistent in any movement practice. And so that's really what the book, the Aligned Method outlines is. What's the foundational, like the low-hanging fruit. If you were learning to drive a car, when you were 16, they would teach you all the signals and they teach you like the general fundamentals of being on the road.

And. I mean, I'm so grateful for the opportunity to get to work with some of the highest level athletes and martial artists and various different people that are just like they're at the peak of what the body can do. And they always come back to the fundamentals. Every person, the more seasoned a person is, the more they'll start harping on the fundamentals.

And that's been my experience for sure. So that's really what the alignment that is breaks down like the nuts and bolts of like, what do you really need to know about being in this physical experience? And then going beyond just the mechanical aspects of the physical experience, like getting into your senses, for example.

So you are moved by your senses, the section, they might be section four, it's called, what do we call it? Moving your senses, your senses, movie, sunlight, that some integration of your senses. And they literally, they inform the way that you feel. They inform the way that you move. You know? So when you hear a sound for example, back to the Albert Mehrabian 38% of our communication comes from the tone of our voice. We're literally starting to tune each other's autonomic nervous systems for tuning each other state. So if I start to slow down, you know, and my voice has maybe a little bit lower suddenly just listening, it might feel a bit like, ah, like, oh yeah, it feels different.

Relax. No worries. If I start to get a little bit higher and such a little bit faster than I go, that you start to notice, you'll start feeling tension in your body. Just as a product of the way that the person communicates. So you go on a date with a person you don't like their voice. It's like, it's going to be a really tough match.

Kristel:

Right? I mean, these are things that we don't really think about and they have such a profound impact on how we feel on a day-to-day basis. And I would love your insights into what people can do for a couple of specific things. So the categories I'm thinking about are: Moms who their bellies have gotten stretched out like the core. If you have any recommendations for that. And then I want to segue into back issues. Cause that's something that men, women, so many people face, and I'm just hoping you can share, like where can people get started in those two different avenues. 

Aaron:

Yeah. Well, for women, especially after giving birth rectus diastasis is a thing that can happen where the rectus abdominis, the muscles start to kind of like separate.

So that included, but also outside of that, just starting to remeet the abdomen back together, whether you're a weightlifter or a mom, the principles do not change, no matter what you're doing at the highest level or at the lowest level, just sitting around. The principles, how to inhabit your body with greatest efficiency, they do not change.

The physical experience is so much easier than what we think when we look at all these different, crazy things. So really nice thing to do if you're say. A mom and you're having low back pain would be to create a little bit of neutrality in the spine in your daily life. So a beautiful thing that someone could do is like an actual, like practice a technique of sorts would just be laying on the floor in general, like get your body down on the ground.

You need to get your body down on the ground with great regularity. Right now, as we're recording this, I'm, I'm sitting on the ground. I mean, like across like a position.

Kristel:

Oh, very cool. You know, I love sitting cross legged too. That's like a very comfortable position for me. I sit like that. 

Aaron:

Of course. Any culture we'll get back to the mom stuff, but any culture that spends time with regularity in the ground.

So there's been research in Northern Africa, Eastern Mediterranean, Southeast Asia, but me really just go anywhere where people are spending time on the ground. They have minimal to no incidence of osteoarthritis in the hips and the knees public Florida's function is diminished. Like they're just genuinely more sprightly people. You know, so the number one leading reason for elderly needing assisted living is they fall and they can't get up, which is such a terrible scenario to essentially, we're unconsciously choosing the path to arrive at a point where in 20 years, 50 years, 60 years, whatever it is. There's a high probability chance, I literally will not be able to get my body up off of the ground if I'm like dust in the wind of the modern obsession with being on chairs all day long. So when you're in chairs all day long, you're outsourcing that range of motion below 90 degrees of the hips and the knees and the ankles for that matter.

That's like the more cataclysmic, like, oh my God, what have I done part? You know, so if you, the chasm between getting up and down off of the ground, it never needs to separate. There never needs to be a chasm. And if you're in a culture where they just do that, they have maybe a comfy rug or maybe like Moroccan poofs on the ground or Ford cushions, or they keep it yoga mat lying around, or a foam roller down there when they're having breakfast or drinking tea or whatever.

They just have a setup in your home where it's easy, comfortable, convenient to be on the ground. And also put that space near a window. Right now, as I'm talking to you, I'm looking out a window and there's a river right across from here. So I'm regularly taking eye breaks to be able to calm my nervous system, because vision, your visual senses is, you know, your eyes are continuation of your central nervous system.

When you are focusing in my optically on some object, that's going to kind of rev you up. When you take in the Panorama, that's going to put you into that more calm, rest digest. So-called the parasympathetic nervous system. You, so it puts you in to this place where you're like, ah, I'm just taking it all in.

So back to the mom's stuff, all of that is mom's stuff slash human stuff, but starting to, yeah. Spine is starting to go into that hyperextension, pelvic interior, tilt, tightness up in like the soloists and hip flexors. Some of these like kind of famous, they become like famous muscles over the last five to whatever years.

If you go to say like any personal trainer, yoga instructor, I think it's your iliopsoas. Most definitely. The iliopsoas.They’re kind of right. Sometimes not always, but when that gets short in the front. Those muscles from not just the psoas, but in this case specifically, the psoas they're connecting from the femur and then they're coming across up and connecting into the spine.

So when you start to chronically shorten those guys, it will start to dump your pelvis forward and puts you into this hyper extension position, your lumbar spine. And it's a really unstable position to be in. And so now every time that you are doing anything, if your central column, you know, your central nervous system, your spine, your axial skeleton. If that thing is twisted, turned, torqued out of alignment, out of neutrality. Then your body literally doesn't trust you to produce power. So it will make you less strong. It'll make you start to contract and kind of feel like you're like unsafe in a way. 

So something that you can do would just be starting to pay attention to kind of knitting your ribs down towards your hips. When you're kind of standing around you're at a bank, have an exhalation, you can procure your thumbs up to the bottom of your ribs, but your pinkies down to your hips and kind of just close that space.

And you can do that with a long exhalation activating some of the deep muscles around there, the core set muscles, people call them transverse abdominals, and then that same principle, a good technique or exercise you can play with. It'd be just lay on your back, put your feet up on a couch with a couch. So I have a couch, but I mostly liked on most of this stuff on the ground.

I use the couch for whatever, watch movies or something, but bring your legs up on the couch and same thing. Now you're decompressing your lower back. Lay your body flat on the ground. You bring your hands down to your abdomen, just have a few exhalations and just start to feel that decompression in the low back.

And that'd be a beautiful thing to start to just add into like a little restorative practice for people. 

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Kristel:

Yeah, that sounds amazing. Now, what do you think about extensions like mini cobra type things. 

Aaron:

It's great. As long as it's not just exacerbating dysfunction in the lumbar spine in the low back.

So oftentimes what we're going to do is we're going to dig once we groove a pattern where people in digging that pattern more and more and more until eventually it becomes a rut. So with that awesome. But just emphasize the movement into the thoracic spine. Thoracic being 12 vertebra above the lumbar and below the cervical.

So above the low back and below the neck. So the space between like mid spine behind the heart. So emphasize that space. Think I'm opening my heart to getting into like Eastern esoteric talk, which west and east. And that's a big part of what the Align method is. It's really like a convergence of Eastern medicine and Western anatomical spec.

In my experience, both worlds, unless somebody's full of shit, you know, which I am sometimes, you know, we all are in moments if we're honest. They're saying the same thing. And so it's like two different languages, one person speaking French, one person speaking German. It sounds wildly different the way that they're communicating.

But in fact, they're saying the exact same thing. 

Kristel:

Yeah, this is great. We started, we are talking about extensions and then soAaron, I would love to hear your thoughts on how to do cardio appropriately and things like hit workouts. If you think that those are healthy, not healthy. Good for us, not good for us.

How do you feel about that?

Aaron:

I think cardio and hit and all of the different, any type of like style of movement. It's really, the foundation is focusing on form, you know? And so oftentimes if your cardio is kind of just going out and doing like this, like long slog, like death March, where you're kind of, you know, you're just collapsing slowly burning yourself into the ground, you know, as you're just like sweating and it's like, that's fine from a metabolic perspective, it's not for testosterone. So it's not just like by doing more work, it's just better for everything. It will train your body to be able to sustain that. But I would prefer from a structural perspective to be focusing more on like plyometric work and sprinting and hit and that's, you know, that's where hit comes in.

So I think hits a much more natural from like an ancestral perspective, you know? So in nature, if you know, if you're hunting a Buffalo, probably not hunting the Buffalo, but whatever you're going after, you're going to be moving for a while. Then there may be a sprint. Then there may be a pause. Then there may be another sprint and then there might be.

So having that adaptability and your movement is really valuable, but the main overarching theme with all of that would be just focusing on form. And once you feel your body start to collapse, pull back until you can come back into a more mechanically sound position and a part of that as well isn't just musculoskeletal foot alignment relation to the knee and the hip and the spine, but also respiration.

So if you are really in my book, we have chapter seven, I think it's all, all about nose breathing, the value of nose breathing. And in that we kind of break it down, but like a gear system, which I borrowed from a friend called Brian McKenzie . Actually helped me put it together. And the fifth year, like maxing out gear would be starting to utilize your mouth for respiration, for breathing, but it'd be something that'd be very rare.

And so ideally when you're exercising, working out, try to position the workout so that it's much of it, ideally, maybe even all of it is through your nose. And so something that you can do is even tape your mouth and just really focus that air going through. Because it's helpful with engaging the diaphragmatic muscles and supple with filtering the air. There's like 30 odd different processes that the nose does in relation to respirations, helpful production of nitric oxide, which is helpful with general circulation and the pliability and flexibility of your whole cardiovascular system. So that would be the two things. One, form of your physical body, like musculoskeletal alignment.

Once you feel you starts to just collapse, pull back and maintain stable positions. And then the other stable position would be a stable respiratory position, which would be nose breathing. 

Kristel:

Gotcha. Okay. Do you know Patrick McCowen? 

Aaron:

Yeah, he's about it. I just recorded a podcast with him on three days ago or something.

Kristel:

Oh, cool. Yeah. Yeah. So I had him on mine a while back and after that episode, I was like, all right, Patrick, I'm going to try it. I'm going to go for my run and try and breathe through my nose the whole time. And I've got to say, like in the beginning it was okay. But then like towards the end it was uncomfortable, you know?

Aaron:

You need to open your nasal passages. So getting, getting like one of those like nasal strips, or you can get different different devices kind of open the nasal passages. There's like plastic ones. I think the plastic ones where we're going, it's like two little circles that you can just put into your nostrils and it just, it like flares your nostrils.

It's an interesting thing that every race is we as human race. And an ideal world, if you want to be a better athlete, you'd be opening up that intake. 

Kristel:

I see. Okay. So that's a interesting idea. I mean, I might look a little funny running with it, but who cares? 

Aaron:

You know, and if you were eating the right foods from a young age and getting the right nutrients from a young age and having proper tongue posture and jaw postural patterns, which you can get more into that. We have all of that. And Patrick McCowen actually did the revisions and kind of edits for my book as well, specifically the nose breathing chapter. So we break it down a really simplified terms, but McCowen's work is really great.

Also, James Nestor's book breathe is really excellent with that. There's tons of different resources. There's close your mouth. Save your life, was a book written by a guy called George Catlin like 200 years ago and he was studying. Yeah, he was studying native Americans and just the difference in their dental health, you know?

So, yeah. So it's the settlers, you know, which was what he was. He was like a lawyer and, you know, restructured all the things. They had really misaligned teeth or malocclusion. They had like dark crusty teeth. Like it was like not good dental health. And then they go out and see the savages that are living out in  continuity with nature, essentially when they're eating meat and they're having used their jaws and they're eating hard vegetables and it's like, they really engaging their jaws and their nose breathing they have dramatically better dental health, and they're not spending thousands and thousands of dollars on orthodontic care.

And they're the brutal savages. 

Kristel:

Wow. Really interesting. Interesting. Okay. So I have one more question and then we're going to go to the Wellness lightning round. But talking about hit, this is something I've had personal experience, which is kind of why I'm asking, but there's a lot of times where I feel like some of the exercises recommended just don't feel good for my body. And I don't feel like they would be necessarily good for anyone like the burpees where you're down and then you jump up. 

I just think about the traction, like on your knees. Do you think that's because of the form or do you think that if you have the right form, that those exercises potentially could be helpful?

I'm thinking more of like just the aggressive jump up and down. 

Aaron:

Anything is great with mechanically sound form. So if you are just, and this is the value and issue of competitive fitness, like Karavis a CrossFit would be the first thing that comes to most people's minds with that. So it did a really beautiful job of cultivating community.

So tribe, like that's what people really desire. I think that's a big reason why people engage into different dietary dogmas, veganism. It's like if you put an ism based off of the stuff that you put into your face, there's an ism around that. It's like, you just want community. That's what you want. Like, I don't think there was ever any ancestral person in the history of homosapiens or before that had any ism in relation to the things they put in their face.

It was just like, oh, we, we hunt and we gathered and we consider it for sustenance. Yeah. It's like, yeah, it's something we all share. There's no tribal, you know, I'm here, you guys are over there with it. So cross, it did a great job with that. And I think engaging with community is a part of fitness and as a part of nutrition, even when you can there's a study, we might've mentioned this before, but it was, I think her name was Tina field.

Tiffany field is her name. And I think your shoe is maybe the University of Miami. And she said was studying infants in that swore premiums because they were in incubators and they gave them. I believe if I remember correctly, I think it was 15 minutes of let's kind of a little like infant massage, three times a day.

And they found that it increased their growth rate. Pretty sure it was 47% if I remember correctly. And, uh, and they were released from the incubator sooner. And so like brushing shoulders with people and having eye contact and engagement. I think there's different ways to there's other ways to touch people other than just physical mechanical touch.

There's also touching with your eyes, there's touching with just empathy, like feeling for someone, you know, so in the Nate part of touch, I know I'm kind of wandering off from your question, but I think this is an interesting thing and late. When you're touching someone, massaging someone naturally, you're going to start to engage with all of those things of like, just caring for a person, listening to a person, showing them that, like you love them, you care about them.

And so by incorporating that into fitness, I think that's just like a really genius component to it. That really is and that's why people are so engaged with it. Almost like addicted to it. And then within that, comes the competitive part, which is beautiful because we need that too. But then the form starts to diminish because it's just about the arrival. It's just about the destination. It's not about the journey. So if you can marry those two and really have a great destination that gets you all excited and then also be deeply engaged with the journey, then you're doing great. Like you're winning, whatever you do. You're pretty much winning at that point, you know?

And so when you're going through the burpee, it's just paying attention to, I mean, we can break down the basic mechanics if you want to, but that's the main thing. If you can understand how to maintain proper mechanics throughout the movement, there is no bad movement

Kristel:

Gotcha. Okay. Now, that's good to know. So at this point, let's, we're going to come to the end.

Anything else you want to share before we do the quick wellness lightning round, Aaron? 

Aaron:

No. No, we're good. 

Kristel:

All right. Awesome. Well, there'll be linked to your book and your social and all that stuff in the episode details. So if you want to learn more, check those things out. All right, Aaron, here we go. 

So first question you are on a desert island. You might be there for a really long time and you can only bring three foods and that's all you're going to be able to eat while you're there. What would those three foods. 

Aaron:

I bring an animal. So assuming I can get, are there animals on the island? I guess you probably don't care about these specifics.

Kristel:

The only thing you can eat is what you bring. 

Aaron:

And it really any kind of animal. So if you eat an animal nose to tail, then you can survive fairly healthfully. I would also say the animal I'd bring, maybe be like, I don't know, like some venison or something. I might bring some deer to the island. That's what they, that's what they did in Hawaii.

And probably two other foods: butter or any kind of fatty type substance, big fan of that. It's gotta be like raw, like really good butter. Or maybe just bring a cow, I guess another cow. So I'll bring deer, I'll bring a cow. I don't know. Some kind of like treat, I don't know. Honey bees. Boom. 

Kristel:

Wow. All right. Second question, what's a book you've read recently that you love that you would recommend?

Aaron:

One that I enjoyed most recently. It's called biochemical individuality. Biochemical individuality essentially is just getting into with the book as a whole gets into how we're very similar, but we're also very different, you know?

And so what serves your body best might not serve my body best from a movement perspective, from a nutritional perspective. And I think that that's where it comes into like really becoming a scientist of yourself, of your own body. I think is really valuable approach, not just kind of outsourcing your self-awareness to someone else.

So in really testing and experimenting and seeing what works best for you, try veganism, try Quito, try carnivore, try fasting, try stuffing yourself at 3:00 AM with taco bell. Do you like, just try it. Yeah, because you don't know, you have all these stories and ideas of like what's bad and good. You really don't know.

You might be like one out of a million that thrives on taco bell at 3:00 AM, you know, and blue lights and you know, all the things. So I think just like be open to trying new things and seeing how it affects you personally, as opposed to just accepting other people's opinions. 

Kristel:

Sure. Okay. Last question, knowing what you know today, what advice would you have given to yourself from 10 years ago?

Aaron:

I think I would just probably. I don't think I would give any advice. Really. I think I just, listen. I think it'd be more of just a listener. Like not trying to tell me to do anything, but perhaps I think you can share a lot with a person just through your presence and through just like actively being like the highest version of yourself or whatever, highest form of yourself.

I don't, I think it sounds a little, but yeah, I think I would just be, I would just listen and be. 

Auntie 1 :

Got it. Love it. 

Kristel:

Well, Aaron, this has been so fun. Thank you so much for taking some time today, sharing all your insights. I really appreciate it.

Aaron:

I appreciate you.

Kristel Bauer
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