Hey, what's up, motivators Taren here.
I recently read a great book about the Dopamine reward pathway.
On the good side of things,
this pathway is what allows us to be motivated and figure things out and push
ourselves to being better versions of ourselves.
But the other side side of that coin is very negative.
This is also what causes us to get
addicted to drugs or gambling or sex or become overweight.
As endurance athletes, we can fortunately harness the Dopamine reward pathway.
And I want to talk about how we can use it
to avoid a lot of the bad things involved with extreme amounts of fitness and really
work towards achieving our goals, bigger goals than we ever thought
imaginable by using the Dopamine reward pathway for good, not evil.
My name is Terry Gazelle.
In my twenties, I was overweight,
unfulfilled, and couldn't even run to the end of the block.
Over the following years, I found endurance sports lost £65,
won age groups, race, world championships, growth records, and trained and.
Learned from some of the best athletes.
And coaches in the world.
You too can use endurance sports to change
your life and accomplish your fitness goals.
You just need a system.
A system that's meant for us amateurs
who want to be our best while feeling our strongest and healthiest.
My company, Mottiv,
offers that system and I want to share some of the tips from it today.
Thank you for tuning in, Motivators.
So I recently read a book called The Molecule of More.
Excellent, excellent book.
It's even a good audio book.
I recommend that you check it out.
There will be an affiliate link
in the description below, but it talks about Dopamine and its role
in always driving us and pushing us for more.
And this is an excellent thing.
Now, we have a diagram here of the Dopamine reward pathway.
And you don't have to really understand
a whole lot about this, but we can simplify your understanding
of it to Dopamine and the reward network, it pushes us to achieve more.
More than what? Well, just more.
It's just simply more that dopamine is always going to push you towards.
Now, this largely relates to three different things.
The first one being shelter.
It's going to push us to have more safety, better shelter, be safer, be warmer,
be safe from the elements, be safe from predators.
The second thing that it's going to push us towards is sustenance.
So food, making sure that we always have
enough food to fuel our body and we aren't going to starve.
And then the third being strength,
making sure that we are strong enough that if we are out of our shelter or we
don't have enough sustenance, that we can fend off attacks,
or we can be out there for a long time looking for more and more sustenance.
So it's always going to be pushing us for more.
And you might think, well, hey, isn't this great.
Isn't this what makes us human?
And the answer is yes.
This is what pushed us to build cities and agricultural processes and jobs
and structures of civilizations that allowed us humans to thrive.
What shelter pushes us to do is this pushes us to look for housing,
to get cars, to get clothing, to get more and more stuff, to accumulate things.
On the sustenance side of things, this is agricultural processes,
this is grocery stores, this is money and currency so that we can
actually have an exchange so that we do work, we get money and then we can
actually go buy food with it or clothing, all of these things.
And then the strength side of it as it relates to us athletes,
this is what pushes us to increase our amount of fitness, to lift weights and be
bigger and bulkier and stronger to complete endurance races.
In our mind, we are able to go and track down prey or food or run away
from a predator for a longer and longer period of time.
It's going to push us to do more and be healthier.
But you might be able to see where I'm
going with this is constantly pushing yourself for more and more shelter.
Dopamine doesn't care how much you have,
it just cares about how much more you can get on the shelter side of things.
If you're just constantly working to accumulate things.
This is where people work themselves to the bone to always accumulate more
and more wealth so they can buy more and more things.
And this is where we get burnout.
This is where people have worked all their
lives and never actually enjoyed their lives.
On the sustenance side of things, this is where we have people that are
overweight because they are always wired to eat more.
And our instinct is always about eating more, doesn't care if that more is
healthier, it's just about eating more calories.
And then on the strength side of things,
this relates to overtraining because again, more is just always the answer.
To dopamine more is how we get fulfilled.
It drives us to not just be excited about a five k, but then we have to do a ten k
and then a marathon, and then a then an ultra trail run
and then 100 marathons in 100 days and then 100 iron mans in 100 days.
There is never any satisfaction to dopamine.
It always just needs to do more.
Now, dopamine also causes us to abandon our morals.
It's what causes people to cheat on their wives, to seek pleasure in something new.
It's what causes people to break the law and lie and cheat for personal gain.
It's what causes people to gamble and what causes people to get addicted to drugs.
And unfortunately for us endurance athletes, there are people that are
on the spectrum of people who are more driven than the average person
for achievement and gratification and being better than other people sounds
a lot like endurance athletes who are always constantly pushing themselves to do
more than the average person and get that recognition from society thinking oh
hey, you can do something that nobody else can and they get gratification in that.
And so we are very susceptible
to the negative side of this Dopamine reward pathway.
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Now, You Can is an excellent blood sugar stable source of carbohydrates.
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I really like taking the Yukan bars, the yucan granola, as a food source.
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That'S applied to checkout again, that is.
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Thanks you can.
So let's put this in the context of you today or you when you are starting out,
you're always starting at a current level of fitness wherever you are.
And we are all going to have drive to have more goals, to seek more.
Maybe that's getting off the couch
and doing a fivek or maybe that is going from an Olympic distance triathlon
to an Iron Man or an ultra triathlon or an ultra trail run.
Now, what you might be thinking is that I'm sitting here saying don't
actually aspire to have more and that's not the case because it's that more.
It's these goals right here that get us excited.
This is the exciting part about life being
a better version of ourselves and challenging ourselves.
This is what lights us up inside.
This is where we start feeling excited.
Now, the cool thing about Dopamine is that you can use it to delay gratification
and if you are smart, you can use Dopamine not for this instant gratification.
You can use Dopamine to outsmart that process.
Instead of just doing this
straightforward, I'm just going to go towards it.
What we need to do with Dopamine is say we want the goals, but a smarter and better
way to do it is to take the longer way, which is still going to get us to our
goals, but it's going to get there in a healthy way, in a safer way,
in a way that allows us to layer a year of fitness upon another year of fitness
upon another year so that we don't just get stalled out at one goal that we can
build to another goal and another goal and another goal.
So let me just give you some examples about how you can reach your goal
but in a smarter way and use dopamine to be a better version of yourself.
Instead of just taking the shortcut that might lead to some negative outcomes.
The instant reward is just working harder and not creating a smart training plan.
The longterm reward is creating a well
thought out training plan that is balancing recovery,
is balancing low intensity with high intensity, is changing throughout
the year, is very dynamic, is prioritizing health as opposed to performance.
And then the around the way kind of reward is that you still get to performance.
You just take the long sort of inadvertent way to get there.
The instant reward method says, hey, carbs taste good.
Carbs are what makes me faster on race day.
Carbs are everything, so I'm going to take carbs all the time.
The long term reward is understanding
that you need to be able to burn carbs and access them on race day.
But there are times where you also want to teach your body to burn fat as fuel.
So there are some workouts where you take a lot of carbs, some workouts where you
practice your race nutrition, some workouts where the purpose is to burn
fat as fuel and teach your body how to do that.
So you actually maybe restrict carbs or
take carbs from a lower glycemic index source.
The instant gratification for a lot of endurance athletes as well.
I don't like doing strength training or
yoga because I'm not good at it, so therefore I'm not going to do it.
And how important can it be?
The long term reward system is, well, hey, I know that strength training is very
beneficial to performance and making sure that when I'm not doing endurance sports
that I'm not stiff as a board so that I can continue to age well.
So I'm going to work to have a strength and yoga and mobility training program
in my endurance training program that complement each other so that I'm not
just slapping it on top, I'm not just adding it really quickly.
I'm working to find something that creates
a cohesive plan which let's just face it, if you're using dopamine for good,
you have to take a step back and think, okay, what is a smarter way to do this
and get to the same goal that I want to get to in a healthy way,
in a fulfilling way, in a way that promotes longevity.
Because that better way is going to allow me to leapfrog from that goal to the next
goal and the next goal and the next goal over and over.
Whereas the instant gratification way
might mean that you can reach that first goal.
But maybe you're sick, maybe you're injured,
maybe you're just tapped out and plateaued and there is no next goal.
And just so you know,
how we're thinking about the future of our endurance training app is we want to make
it rewarding every single day to do the right things,
that instead of just getting rewarded in the app for doing more and constantly
having a street, we can actually change that model.
So you start getting rewarded for good habits, you start getting rewarded
for taking rest days, you start getting rewarded for low heart
rate training, you start getting rewarded for strength training or yoga.
And the incentives in our app aren't going to be about always doing more.
It's going to be about being a better version of yourself in a balanced way.
So affiliate link is in the description below to that book.
I highly recommend you check it out.
If you're interested in understanding the motivations of humans and athletes
and think of it in terms of Hey, what does this mean for me?
And what does this mean for the endurance community?
And you start to feel really empowered
going, hey, I don't have to be at the whim of just general society and my instincts.
I can be the best version of myself by thinking longer term.
Thank you for watching Motivators.
If you're looking for a training plan
that incorporates these methods that is as good as a one on one coach but as
inexpensive as doing it yourself, check out our motive training app
that covers triathlons, running races, dothlons swim runs and cycling events.
The link in the description below where
you can check out your customized training plan for free.
Also, if you rather listen to these tips, we also publish these videos in podcast
format on the Terrance Mottiv Method Podcast so you can check that out.
And if you don't want to do either of those things that you found the video
helpful, hit us up with a virtual high five by smashing the like button below.
Later, Motivators.