This is Dan Goh, a top fitness coach who I recently spoke to about how to get in better shape than 99% of people.

Now, health advice can be really confusing.

So one of the reasons I love Dan's stuff is that he cuts through the noise and gets straight to the point.

And he said that there were just six main things that we needed to do to get into the top 1% of fitness.

Now, for each point, there is a level one, which gets you fitter than the average person and into the top 20%.

And then there'll be a level two, which gets you into the top 1% of fitness and ahead, therefore, of 99% of people.

Principle number one, the body dashboard.

Now, as a business owner, I track a lot of numbers in my business so that we, as a team, know how we're doing.

And these are important things like monthly revenue and expenses and YouTube views and book sales.

When we're in school, we track our exam grades to some degree.

And when you have a job, you might have certain performance goals or KPIs that you have to hit.

But when it comes to our health, we often don't track things in the same way.

But according to Dan, the first thing you should do to improve your health and fitness is to build a body dashboard.

So the body dashboard is a set of numbers that's going to inform you of what your health looks like.

And you have two sets of body dashboard numbers.

You have your surface level numbers and you have your deeper numbers.

Measuring surface level numbers will help you get yourself into the top 20% of people because you need at least some data to track your health and to make improvements over time.

And one of the easiest things I've found to do is to just track my weight every day by stepping onto my Wi-Fi enabled, Bluetooth enabled smart scales every morning.

This randomized control trial that was published in 2020 had different people who were put on a weight loss program.

Now half of these people also weighed themselves up to two times a week and the other half did not.

And these are the results.

So you can see that both of the groups lost weight after six months, but the group that weighed themselves lost 4.5 kg more weight overall, which was a significant difference.

But something to keep in mind when weighing yourself is that the scales don't differentiate between fat and muscle.

So that's why Dan talks about using deeper level body dashboard measurements to get yourself into the top 1% of fitness.

Body dashboard level two.

So a DEXA scan is one of the most accurate ways to track your body composition from your lean mass over to how much fat that you actually have.

Now I actually had my first DEXA scan two years ago on the 17th of June, 2022.

And I've been having DEXA scans about two or three times a year since then.

Now here in London, a DEXA scan costs about 110 pounds.

So it's not insanely expensive.

And for me, the DEXA scan has been one of the single best things I have ever done for my health because it just makes the numbers visible.

And with the DEXA scan, we're looking at three things.

So obviously we're looking at how much body fat you have on your body.

That's number one.

Number two is we're looking at how much lean mass you have.

Now, when I talk about lean mass, it's not necessarily how much muscle you have because lean mass is a combination of your organ weight, of how much muscle you have, and also how much water you have in your body as well.

And the last thing that we're gonna be tracking is gonna be your visceral adipose tissue or your VAT.

Okay, so visceral adipose tissue, VAT, is the fat that lines our organs.

It is different to subcutaneous adipose tissue, SAT, under the skin, and it's associated with lots of medical conditions like diabetes and cancer and heart disease.

Now, in my case, I have a pretty strong family history of heart disease.

And so when I do my DEXA scans, which I've been doing about every three or four months for the last two years, the visceral adipose tissue is a number that I'm particularly interested in.

And then the last part is gonna be your blood work.

Blood work, you can look healthy on the outside, but your blood work is gonna show you how healthy you are, really.

In general, we wanna track cholesterol levels.

We wanna track insulin.

We wanna track, even this one, you won't get this in the blood work, but you will get this from a doctor.

You will wanna track like your blood pressure.

And these are the numbers that will inform you of how healthy you are outside of the surface level of just like looking at you.

Now, Dan recommends, and actually most athletes and entrepreneurs who really, really, really care about their fitness that I've spoken to also agree with this, that you should be getting your blood work done about every six to 12 months.

Crucially, this is not a recommendation for the population level.

This is only a recommendation if you care about being in the top 1% of health and fitness.

But the most important takeaway here, regardless of whether we wanna be average or better than 99% of people, is to start measuring the things that we wanna manage and track the changes over time.

Another really important habit for being in great shape though is meditation, which is where Headspace come in, who are the sponsor of today's video.

Headspace, as you've probably heard of by now, is an amazing meditation app that can help you build a daily meditation practice.

Whether you need support as you navigate life events or handle daily life, or just become the best version of yourself, Headspace can help you out in lots of different ways.

And I've personally worked my way through the introductory course to meditation, which has been really great.

In my case, the habit I'm trying to build is to do a five to 10 minute meditation first thing in the morning before I do my journaling and before I get my coffee.

But very excitingly, I've recently collaborated with Headspace and there is now a Feel Good Productivity Collection, which can help you on the path to building healthy habits to boost your productivity and efficiency.

One of my favourite parts of the collection is the section on play.

Play is the very first chapter of my book, Feel Good Productivity, and it's one of the key sections in the collection as well.

And the content in the collection explores how play is the most underrated secret to productivity, how when we can find a way to approach our work in the spirit of play, it boosts our productivity, it boosts our creativity, it reduces our stress, and it also helps us generate more energy, which we can then give to the other important areas of our life.

Now, if you wanna see how Headspace might be helpful for you and you wanna check out the Feel Good Productivity Collection, you can try it out completely for free for a whole 60 days.

All you have to do is sign up with the link in the video description or scan the QR code on screen.

So thank you so much Headspace for sponsoring this video and let's get back to it.

Principle number two, your movement practice.

All right, so when it comes to movement practice, let's start with level one.

I think like one of the simplest things and one of the most underrated exercises that are out there is simply going for a walk outside without your phone.

Going for a walk is one of these things that not a lot of people think of as exercise, especially in the society that we live in today, but it's one of the most underrated forms of exercise that you can actually do on your body.

Now, something I learned recently that's really stuck with me is that about 10 minutes of walking is around a thousand steps.

So since knowing that, I have been very, very much more motivated to get walking.

Actually, I did this interview with Dan a few weeks ago and since then, after realizing the importance of walking, my step count on average has just absolutely shot up because now each morning I go for a walk, I have my little treadmill walking pad C2 thing under my standing desk.

So I'm kind of taking meetings and stuff while walking.

I've tried to switch a lot of my Zoom meetings to be walking meetings that I'm just on my AirPods and walking around in the local park.

And actually, if I look at what my Apple Health shows, ah, look at this.

I've averaged 20,733 steps a day over the last seven days.

Oh yeah.

Anyway, if you walk eight to 10,000 steps a day, that generally gets you into the top 20% of fitness, which is pretty easy to do.

But if we wanna get into the top 1%, then we need to think about two different types of cardio.

We wanna do two types of cardio.

One of them is zone two cardio, and another one is called HIIT training or high intensity interval training.

Now with zone two cardio, it's what I call conversational cardio.

It's the type of cardio that you can do while having a conversation.

For a lot of people, this is going to vary.

So depending on your cardiovascular levels, for some people, it's gonna be walking or walking at a really fast pace, depending on what your cardiovascular level is.

For other people, it's gonna be jogging.

But you really want to be able to do a type of cardio that keeps you at a conversational pace.

And you wanna do this for anywhere between 150 to 180 minutes per week.

So if we take brisk walking, for example, you could do four pretty fast paced 45 minute walks four times a week, or you could do a 30 minute, very light zone two cardio jog around six days a week.

And both of these would take you to a total of 180 minutes of zone two cardio per week.

I don't do this yet.

I've just incorporated the steps into my life.

And now I need to start incorporating the zone two because I'm like, ah, you know, I really wanna improve my cardiovascular fitness.

Now, the second type of cardio is HIIT training or what we call high intensity interval training.

And high intensity interval training, I call it the heavy lifting for the heart.

It's what's gonna be working your heart at a maximum pace and at a maximum rate.

And then we wanna be doing this at least once a week, anywhere between four to even 15 minutes every single week.

And when you have both of these types of cardio in your system, in your routine, what's gonna happen is, is that you're going to be increasing this number that we call VO2 max, which is the amount of oxygen that your body is able to use at any given time, especially when doing a fitness activity.

And when you raise VO2 max, that is going to raise your fitness levels.

And also that number has also been correlated with living longer, with improved longevity.

Okay, so the way that we measure VO2 max properly is pretty intense.

I've never done it myself, but it's on my bucket list at some point.

So basically they hook you up to a heart rate monitor and you're wearing a mask that measures the oxygen you inhale and exhale.

And you're either running on a treadmill or cycling on a stationary bike.

And the intensity of the exercise is increased gradually over time.

And apparently this is a really grim thing to do because you're basically exercising until the point where you literally can't do it anymore.

And that gives you somehow a measure of your VO2 max.

Now, obviously this would be the gold standard way to measure VO2 max, but actually most of these phones, like Apple health and stuff, also has a sort of a pseudo VO2 max measurement on it with like cardiovascular fitness.

And mine was below average.

And then I started walking a lot more and now it's become average, which is very nice.

So we can look here that if we look at the last 12 months, I am very below average in terms of cardio fitness level, which is a sort of proxy for VO2 max.

But over the last six months, my cardio fitness has very, very slowly gone up.

And also I have turned 30.

So the average for a 30 year old has gotten down.

It's quite a big step change.

So now I'm average rather than below average.

Basically, I need to work on zone two cardio and doing the HIIT stuff as well because my cardio fitness kind of sucks.

So in terms of actionable recommendations, if you are starting from nothing, your progression might look something like this.

Number one, walk for 30 minutes a day.

Number two, keep on increasing your steps each week to hit around 8,000 steps per day.

And at this point, you're probably in the top 20-ish percent of people or at least above average.

Then walk a bit faster or do a light jog to get into your zone two cardio range.

But that could also be things like swimming or yoga or Pilates or whatever instead.

And then as the last level up, once a week we wanna try doing some sort of high intensity interval training like sprints on a treadmill or skipping or a spin class or boxing in a group activity.

I still need to work on the zone two cardio thing and the HIIT thing, but that is next on my bucket list.

Oh, by the way, if you're interested in more real-time updates about my own health journey and stuff I'm learning and reading and conversations I'm having along the way, you might like to subscribe to Life Notes.

This is a free email that I send around once a week with notes from what I've been learning and what I've been incorporating into my life along with favorite books and podcasts and articles and videos and that kind of stuff.

It is completely free.

You can unsubscribe whenever you want if you think it's not very good.

There'll be a link down below if you wanna check it out.

Principle number three, the strength practice.

Principle number three is lifting weights using progressive overload.

Now, depending on what kind of athlete you want to be, it's gonna look different for every single sport that you wanna get better at.

But let's just call it, like, if you wanna get into the top 20% of people, what does that look like?

It looks like using just the most basic exercises and just trying to get stronger or trying to increase the amount of volume that you are doing in those exercises.

So if you're starting out as a complete beginner, it can be useful to follow a program to help guide you through the workouts.

Jeff Nippard, for example, has a really good beginner program that I was following back before I had a personal trainer.

And actually, investing in a few sessions with a personal trainer can also be really, really, really helpful other than getting a DEXA scan every now and then.

Hiring a personal trainer has been one of the most ROI-positive expenses in terms of my own health journey.

Because, like, on a very basic level, they help teach you, like, the right form and you can use the weights and stuff appropriately to avoid injury.

But really, I use a personal trainer as an accountability mechanism because without a personal trainer, I tend not to show up to the gym.

And if I do show up to the gym without a personal trainer, I tend to half-ass it.

Whereas when I have a personal trainer there, they push me, I work hard, I get very sweaty, and then I'm always glad I did it once it's over.

Now, based on my own DEXA scan results, I'm currently above average for the sorts of people that get DEXA scans, which tends to skew sort of more athletic anyway, which is kind of nice.