John Little
Throughout his career, John has worked alongside the biggest names in the industry, from the Estate of Bruce Lee, to bodybuilding icons such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mike Mentzer, Steve Reeves and Lou Ferrigno to action stars such as Jackie Chan. John is also an award-winning documentary filmmaker, having produced and directed films for both independent companies and major studios such as Warner Bros.
John and his wife Terri opened Nautilus North Strength & Fitness Centre in 2004, where they continue to conduct studies on exercise and share the data with their personal training clients. Nautilus North has supervised in excess of 80,000 one-on-one workout sessions.
Check out John Little’s NEW book, The Time-Saver’s Workout: A Revolutionary New Fitness Plan that Dispels Myths and Optimizes Results
In this podcast, we discuss objectivist philosophy, his new book (The Time-Saver’s Workout), training over the long term, and much, much more
Listen to my other podcasts with John here:
- John Little: Inside the Mind of Mike Mentzer, Body By Science and his Workout with Hercules
- How To Find Your Purpose – John Little
Get Exclusive content from John Little inside HIT Business Membership
Enjoy the show!
- Listen to it on Apple Podcasts
- Stream by clicking here
- Download as an MP3 by right-clicking here and choosing “save as”
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Show Notes
Click the link below to listen from the exact time stamp on Overcast:
- What has John been up to? [4:30]
- Why does objectivism appeal to many in the HIT community? [11:10]
- The importance of being liberated intellectually [19:30]
- Why did John write The Time Savers Workout? [23:00]
- Is the exercise pendulum swinging away from HIT? [31:20]
- Should you play sport? [35:05]
- Why do professional athletes have a shorter lifespan? [50:10]
- How much recovery do you need from exercise? [54:40]
- How long should you stick with a specific routine? [1:00:00]
- How quickly does the body adapt to an activity? [1:08:55]
Selected Links from the Episode
- Who Killed Tom Thomson?: The Truth about the Murder of One of the 20th Century’s Most Famous Artists by John Little
- Objectivism
- Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
- Existentialism
- Gary Knight – Objectivism, Mike Mentzer, and his “NEW” HIT Program: HD Retro (#213)
- Nautilus North Study
- Bod Pod
- Myostatin
- Book Review: The Time-Saver’s Workout, by John Little
People Mentioned
- Che Guevara
- Fidel Castro
- Ayn Rand
- Leonard Peikoff
- Gary Knight (Listen to my podcasts with Gary here: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3)
- Mike Mentzer
- Voltaire
- Bruce Lee
- Jean-Paul Sartre
- Friedrich Nietzsche
- Arthur Jones
- Bertrand Russell
- Sergei Rachmaninoff
- Socrates
- Alan Watts
- Frank Zane
- William Shakespeare
- Dr Doug McGuff (Listen to my podcasts with Doug here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5)
- Steve Maxwell (Listen to my podcast with Steve here: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3)
- William Perry
- Simon Shawcross (Listen to my podcasts with Simon here: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3)
429 – A Deep Dive into Joint-Friendly Fitness with Bill DeSimone: A New Paradigm in Exercise Safety
428 – Unlocking Synergy or Sowing Confusion: The Risks and Rewards of Adding HIT to Your Health Business with Luke Carlson
427 – The HIT Protocols Pete Cerqua Used to Grow a 7-Figure Personal Training Business
Great episode. I particularly enjoyed the message that essentially said “get your gains, then get on with real life”.
Just one counter to John. I read a good article in New Scientist earlier this year by Herman Potzner about human activity needs https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/humans-evolved-to-exercise/?redirect=1 it’s behind a paywall but there are lots of discussions about it via google eg: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/danpeterson/2019/02/why-humans-unlike-the-great-apes-must-be-active-to-be-healthy-2.html (I’d also recommend further reading on his work on constrained energy expenditure re his studies with the Hadza hunter gatherer society).
Cheers
Andrew:
That was an interesting link. Thanks for posting.
It seems like there are contending points of view: we were evolved to exercise, but also to conserve energy. I found this paper which tries to reconcile the two points of view:
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Is-Exercise-Really-Medicine-An-Evolutionary-Lieberman/c0573a250c542fb937039c9c4a8b85b04a4c09f4
Cheers Greg!
Cheers Andrew. Pleased you enjoyed it.
I’ve heard of Herman. This is really interesting. Thanks for sharing.
Mabye in part 2? I think it would interesting to hear about the variation in TUL and inroad that John has encountered with himself and with his clients over the years. I myself don’t use very long times. But I thought it would cool to hear about maybe those that made progress using ultra brief TUL and or able to inroad very quickly.
I really enjoyed JL’s last podcast, but when I saw the ad for this one and that objectivism would be covered, I was expecting him to be a “team member” like many other prominent HIT proponents/gurus (I don’t mind Ayn Rand, but the huge collective HIT trainers/ees support always seemed a bit strange). I was pleasantly surprised by what he had to say…
It strikes me that physical activity was talked about in a rather negative light, as a detriment to health and structure. I think it should be understood, however, that load is important for healthy joints, and structure in general. Being too careful with physical activity, or being afraid of being injured all the time, can be a worse problem and borders on “fear avoidance behavior” that can be very detrimental to physical and psychological health.
I finally got around to listening to the podcast, which was interesting and entertaining.
I think he may be overly cautious with respect to his concerns about wear and tear. Joints are not passive mechanical structures which only experience wear. They are living biological structures which can adapt to some extent. You obviously need to avoid exceeding your joints’ abilities to recover from stress. But too little stress might also be a problem.
Perhaps too much of the thinking around HIT is focused on or driven by hypertrophy considerations? That certainly seemed to be John’s primary criteria when judging recovery and workout frequency. I will agree that for getting close to your genetic muscular potential, using a fairly intense, infrequent, and abbreviated training routine may be good enough. But is muscle size all that one needs to worry about in terms of health? We are not lions, built for power and short bursts of speed to bring down game. As per the articles linked above, it appears that we carry a lot of evolutionary baggage that developed to support a fairly high volume of low to moderate intensity physical activity on a daily basis, consistent with being a species that walked a lot while foraging and hunting. Can a once per week 20 minute strength training session serve as an effective replacement all that activity? It is a question worth pondering.
Excellent show ! I’ll be looking forward to part two .
Another great show with the man himself John Little ! John is very wise and always imparts much knowledge .
Max Pyramid and One and Done are awesome. I don’t know how much less wear and tear and time efficient it get’s than this. Very motivational indeed. Truly adjunct to life/life enhancing. The emphasis of critical thinking and not accepting things blindly very motivating.
Being someone that has long been fascinated with the stimulus aspect of all this, It doesn’t get much more streamlined, low wear and tear than Max Pyramid and Done In One.
John mentioned something about gluconeogenesis kicking in when doing a HIT session because the glycogen stores get depleted. I think he is in error. There are very few calories we expend in a HIT session (ie, moving 400# over 2 feet out and then 2 feet back in a leg press is about 1600 ft-lbf. If we do 6 reps, that’s about 10,000 ft-lbf, which is about 3 kcal of energy). A typical 20 min slow walk is about 100 kcal of energy. And there are about 1200 kcal of energy (400 in the liver alone and 800 in the muscle) stored as glycogen in our bodies. So 3 kcal of glycogen is minuscule, and hardly enough to go through the glycogen and way too little to engage gluconeogenesis. If you don’t take in calories for 24-48 hours, you probably will begin to get glucose, but not from a single HIT session. The science is indisputable here, it seems.