The Maffetone Method
The Holistic, Low-Stress, No-Pain Way to Exceptional Fitness
I was first introduced to Phil Maffetone in Christopher McDougall’s great book Natural Born Heroes. Have you ever heard of Mark Allen? If you’re a triathlete you know he’s a legend. For those who might not know, Allen won the Ironman world championships an unprecedented six times. Triathlete magazine voted him the greatest triathlete of all time. You know his secret? Maffetone. In this book we get an overview of The Maffetone Method. Big Ideas we cover include the importance of remembering it's all about health AND fitness, making your workouts feel like a GIFT rather than a chore, how to build a super-strong aerobic base while burning fat for fuel and tracking it all via your #1 piece of equipment: that workout diary of yours with goals (what are yours?), strategies (yours?) and workouts (how're yours?). Ready to Optimize your energy and actualize your health AND fitness goals? Let's do this!
Big Ideas
- Health *and* fitnessOptimize both.
- Gift vs. ChoreGo with the gift.
- How’s your MAF?Build your aerobic base.
- Carbohydrate intoleranceAnd fat burning vs. gaining.
- The Most important piece of EquipmentYour workout diary. What’s in yours?
“The Maffetone Method stresses simplicity and common sense. Once you learn a few commonly misunderstood concepts of exercise and diet, you’ll be well on your way. The most inexpensive and perhaps most successful workout device is the one you possess naturally: no machine will do more for you than you can do with your own body. Dramatic benefits from exercise can be attained by easy walking 30 minutes, five days a week. To do more, such as running a marathon, will require additional training, but never to the point of pain. …
The Maffetone Method will give you unlimited energy, make you burn more body fat, and improve the quality of your life—forever. It is based on a number of scientifically proven concepts known to few people other than exercise professionals. ‘No pain, no gain,’ while an intriguing advertising message and a temporarily effective exhortation from a high school varsity coach, is quite simply wrong. When you exercise strenuously, your body is programmed to burn less fat. To encourage your body to burn more fat all day long, you must keep your heart rate within certain target levels, the formula for which is simple. In fact, when you finish a workout, you should actually feel as if you could easily do it again.”
~ Philip Maffetone from The Maffetone Method
I was first introduced to Phil Maffetone in Christopher McDougall’s great book Natural Born Heroes. McDougall tells us that Maffetone had a huge impact in the athletic world then basically disappeared into hermit-mode (go hermits!). In his book, McDougall shares his challenges in tracking down this genius-hermit to tap into his unusual training methods.
We’ll talk about some of that wisdom in the Note. First… Have you ever heard of Mark Allen? If you’re a triathlete you know he’s a legend. For those who might not know, Allen won the Ironman world championships an unprecedented six times. Triathlete magazine voted him the greatest triathlete of all time.
You know his secret?
Maffetone.
Allen wrote the foreword to the book and attributes his success to following Maffetone’s method.
I’ve had the basic wisdom from Natural Born Heroes in my head since I read the book a couple years ago and started my casual training for Spartan Races. But, after recently running into a Spartan world champion (50+ age group) on my morning trail workout, I was inspired to take my training up a notch so I searched through the ol’ home library to find this book.
Written in 2000, the book is simultaneously old-school/dated and yet, somehow, still cutting-edge. Maffetone pioneered a lot of the whole fat-for-fuel wisdom that is now super popular and I enjoyed going to the source. If that sounds like fun, get a copy of the book here. (btw: Maffetone is considerably easier to find these days! Cruise on over to his site here.)
It’s packed with Big Ideas and I’m excited to share the basic framework of the Maffetone Method along with some wisdom you can apply to your life TODAY so let’s jump straight in!
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Download PDFI realized that the human body would progress athletically naturally if it was not overstressed. I decided to see how successful an average person could be by following a no-pain approach to exercise. I was embarrassed that I had subscribed to the ‘no pain, no gain’ theory, so well entrenched in our society.
Get the BookHealth *and* fitness
“Two words tossed around as casually as a pair of running shoes are health and fitness. But the difference between them forms the foundation of an exercise philosophy and a workout ethic.
Health is a state in which all the body’s parts, including the muscles, nerves, bones, hormones, organs, and glands, are in balance, or what some call ‘harmony.’ A perfect state of health may not be attainable but always improving our health is something we can all strive for.
Unfortunately, many people assume that health necessarily declines with age. While it is common for health to decline with age, the decline need not be significant. The more we care for our body, the healthier it will become and the longer we will be able to withstand the adverse affects of aging. We have the potential to increase our brain power as we age, get into great physical shape, perhaps the best shape of our lives, and to feel better than ever. This is one of the benefits of proper exercise.
Fitness is the ability to be physically active. For some, this means working out; for others, it means playing tennis again after years of disability; and for some it means being a Master’s athlete. If you work out four times a week, you’re probably more fit than the person who doesn’t exercise. If you win your club’s tennis tournament, you’re the fittest tennis player there.
But your fitness does not necessarily reflect your health. And being healthy won’t necessarily make you a fit athlete. Health and fitness are two different things. What’s important is to balance the two, to become as healthy and as fit as possible considering your potential, schedule, and desires.”
Health and fitness.
Two different things. We want to make sure we’re Optimizing BOTH.
Let’s draw two Venn circles. On the left we have health. On the right we have fitness. In the middle where they intersect? THAT’s where we want to play.
Then we want to make it a fun game to see just how much we can Optimize each of those—considering, as Maffetone puts it “your potential, schedule, and desires.”
So… What do you want? What does the Optimus (/BEST) version of you look like and what are you willing to do (and not do) to make it happen?
For me? The easiest way to measure my “health” is via my regular blood panels via WellnessFX. (On that note, I need to get in for a new one—lol.) I want it all green. I’m pretty close, but I’m excited to continue to Optimize that. It’s a nice, simple proxy for my overall health.
Fitness-wise, I’m more inspired than ever to see just how fit I can get within some very tight “schedule” constraints and then measure that fitness in Spartan Races. Target: World-Class, aka qualifying for the World-Championships. (And, that target might have been bumped up even more after that serendipitous encounter with a World-Champion Spartan Racer on my Trail.)
btw: One of my friends and mentors Michael Gelb is a qi gong master. He goes to “push hands” classes and pushes guys half his age around the dojo just to make sure his qi is still strong. (Hah.)
Again: How will YOU Optimize your health AND your fitness?
P.S. Remember our whole chat about how you can be “active” AND “sedentary” a la Katy Bowman’s Move Your DNAand Joan Vernikos’s Designed to Move and Movement 101? That parallels this idea. You can go hammer it at the gym for an hour (fit!) but then go sit down for super-long stretches all day every day and not be healthy.
P.P.S. A little note on my training: I want to see how good I can get within the following constraints: No more than 1 hour of “training” per day. (Plus a potential bonus afternoon mellow contemplative hike.) All other training will be integrated into my normal day and not “cost” me any time. For example, when my 1,000-second timer goes off, I do my burpees until I’ve hit 11 sets of 11. (Which helps develop both my health AND fitness btw as per the prior comment.)
… And, now I do grip-strength training by cruising on the rings installed on my office ceiling. (I laugh every time I swing from my desk to the bathroom. And… The “Twister” obstacle my mom’s husband Tom made for me? Getting installed this weekend. Can’t wait! (Video in their garage! :)
“Proper exercise has two primary components. One is that it’s done in a balanced way. ... The other primary concern is fun.”
When in doubt, go slower. It never hurts to work out easier, but working too hard can have adverse consequences.
Aerobic - The ability to obtain more energy through increased fat burning. Anaerobic - The increased use of sugar for energy, and diminished fat burning.
Gift vs. Chore
“Exercise should be fun. If it’s a chore, something probably isn’t right: your workouts may be too long or too intense, or you may not have the right training partner. If it isn’t fun, look for the reason and correct it. Having fun is a great benefit of exercise, especially when other things are tough—when work is not going great, or you have personal stresses, or it’s the dead of winter.”
How’s your exercise? Does it feel like a GIFT or like a chore?
As we’ve discussed, Michelle Segar is one of the world’s leading researchers on the science of health behavior motivation. In No Sweat, she echoes this wisdom: “Let me repeat this because it’s really important: Changing your personal Meaning of exercise and physical activity from a chore into a gift will transform your relationship with movement.”
One of her big things is finding the “right why.” Most people have the *wrong* why.
For example, she’s done research asking people WHY they exercise. The people who say they want to lose weight or live longer or offer some other abstract, long-term, fuzzy goal work out WAY less (and, therefore, experience way less of the benefits of exercise) than people who offer super-concrete, practical, immediate reasons like “I want to feel energized right now!!”
She tells us: “The Successful Cycle of Motivation starts from the “Right Why”—your Right Why. Now you are choosing to move for more relevant and compelling reasons and also choosing physical activities that give you immediate positive feedback: Walking for ten minutes gives you more energy, you’re enjoying being in the present moment when you swim, gardening makes you smile, you’re sharing stories and laughter with your close friend as you work out. Physical activity feels like a gift. Instead of a chore it’s now a want because you reap rewards like fun with your family, focus at work, and feeling centered. It’s the gift that keeps on giving. And you don’t want it to stop.
You find that you can repeat these experiences any time you like, and this motivation becomes self-perpetuating. You feel better because you are moving your body in ways that you determine for yourself and you naturally want to keep moving.”
Gift vs. chore.
So… Why do I hit the Trail every morning with such consistency that you couldn’t PAY me to NOT do it? Because I KNOW that I’m going to a) enjoy it while I’m doing it (I just love being in nature moving without tech) and b) that I’m going to feel GREAT all day after doing it.
Plus… I know that the solitude combined with movement is the perfect way to let my default-mode brain do its thing of processing creative ideas, interpersonal challenges and other things going on in my life.
Enter: A workout that’s a GIFT. Not a chore.
How about YOU? What do you LOVE to do movement-wise?
And… How can you Optimize your Why?
Every exerciser’s worst nightmare is an injury. Unfortunately, it is a common occurrence especially among persons performing anaerobic exercise and among persons who do not warm up properly. Even more unfortunate is that most people believe that being injured is part of the workout game. This is not the case. If you exercise properly, you should never experience injuries (with the rare exception of trauma). If you do get injured, it means that you’ve done something wrong; the injury may be the result of training, diet, nutrition, stress or some other factor.
How’s your MAF?
“Once a maximum aerobic heart rate is found, use a range from that number to 10 beats below that number. For example, if your maximum aerobic heart rate is determined to be 155, your aerobic training zone would be 145-55 bpm.
It is important to note that persons using this formula for the first time often find that the exercise seems too easy. This may be because many people train at very high intensities and/or overtrain. Sometimes persons find that exercise using this formula is too easy because they are programmed according to the ‘no pain, no gain’ myth.
In time, as your aerobic system improves, you’ll have to work harder to maintain the same heart rate. This is discussed further in chapter 7; for now, you should understand that your exercise pace will change. In time you’ll go faster. However, you will perceive your exertion to be about the same since you’ll still be exercising at the same heart rate.”
Welcome to the core of The Maffetone Method: The MAF or Maximum Aerobic Function.
Key point: Train in your AEROBIC zone. Build your aerobic base. How? By keeping things simple and easy. So easy that you might feel like it’s TOO easy. (But only because you’ve unconsciously bought into the myth that it’s *supposed* to be hard no pain, no gain style.)
In Natural Born Heroes, McDougall laughs about how pathetically slow he had to go to stay in his new aerobic zone. (I had the same experience when I first dabbled in this approach a couple years ago.) Then McDougall tells us: “Maffetone has tested it on hundreds of athletes, including triathlon legends like Mike Pigg and Mark Allen, and they’ve consistently come back with the same results: they recover faster from workouts, blow past their old records in competition, and leave chronic injuries behind. One reason they rarely get hurt is that they’re no longer gritting through fatigue. When you go into oxygen debt, your form crumbles. Your head drops, your feet thump, your knees go cockeyed. You get sloppy and you pay for it.’ … ‘But if you’re always going slow,’ I’d asked, ‘how do you ever get fast?’ ‘You work your way up a few heartbeats at a time.’ You adapt. The more workouts you do in the fat-burning zone, the easier they get; the easier they get, the faster you can go.”
All that’s nice but how do we figure out our Maffetone-approved aerobic zone? Easy. Start by subtracting your age from 180. (For me, that’s 180 – 44 = 136.) Now subtract another 10 and we’ve got our zone. (For me, of course, that would be 126-136.) Trained athletes can add 5 beats, if you’re sick/etc, drop some beats.
Pop quiz: What’s YOUR zone?
If you’re feeling so inspired, take a moment to figure it out and then measure your heart rate in your next work out. Unless you’re already practicing this, my hunch is you’ll be surprised to see how just much time you spend OUTSIDE of your aerobic zone. And, you’ll probably feel like staying within your zone is WAY TOO SLOW to get any benefits. (At that point, you might want to remind yourself of the fact that THE greatest Ironman triathlete of ALL TIME attributes his success to this precise method.)
I personally love it because it’s such a *perfect* embodiment of our diligent, patient, persistent process of aggregating and compounding tiny little micro-Optimizations over an extended period of time to create MAGIC. (As a juxtaposition to our society’s manic need to get it all NOW!)
btw: The way to test your progress is to go out and run a mile at your MAF. See how long it takes you. Then do it every month and track the times… (Note to self: Get your baseline this weekend.)
And… In addition to enjoying our training more and avoiding injuries while sustainably building our base, training in our aerobic zone ALSO helps us burn more fat for fuel. Which leads us to the other super-important aspect of The Maffetone Method: our nutrition…
It may be best to define training as an equation: training = workout + rest
The most inexpensive and perhaps most successful workout equipment you naturally possess: your own body. Walking, jogging, running, swimming, and hiking are examples of natural activity. No machine will make your workout more effective than you can do with your own body.
Carbohydrate intolerance
“One of the most common problems found in individuals who have a difficult time burning body fat is carbohydrate intolerance. This condition occurs in persons who eat more carbohydrate foods—breads, cereals, rice, potatoes, sugar and other sweets—than their body can properly metabolize. This results in the production of too much insulin, a hormone released by the pancreas. Too much insulin can prevent fat burning and cause you to store more and more fat in your body. Normally, about 40 percent of the carbohydrate foods you eat are converted to fat and stored. In many people this percentage is much higher due to excess insulin, the result of increased age, genetic predisposition, or stress. Many people whose diet contains 60-70 percent carbohydrates, or more, may be able to burn more fat and be healthier overall once they reduce their carbohydrate intake to a more tolerable level.”
Carbs. <- They’re not part of The Maffetone Method. (Laughing.) (Nor, btw, were they part of the world’s greatest Ironman triathlete.)
Why? Well, check out the book (and our Notes on The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Performance) for more but the short story is that burning fat for fuel is a LOT more efficient. Plus: Consume too much carbage and your pancreas has to work overtime pumping out insulin to regulate your blood sugar. We want that whole process Optimized. (<- Super important!)
Let’s go back to McDougall’s Natural Born Heroes for more here: “Maffetone underlined ‘Test’ in my notebook to make sure I got the point: this is emphatically Not a Diet. Diets, he believes, are a joke. They’re based on a stupid, shame-based notion that losing weight is a matter of willpower and sacrifice, that you’re heavy only because you’re too lazy to starve yourself down to size. ‘It’s baffling anyone still believes that, but they do,’ Maffetone told me. ‘Even when it’s so clearly, visibly, unnatural.’ Humans are hunter-gatherers; we’re born to search for food all day, every day, and scarf it down once we find it. Going hungry is the opposite of everything we’re evolved to do.
So eat all you want, Maffetone urges. Just reboot your belly so it craves the food we’ve always hunted and gathered, not the fake stuff we’ve come to rely on. Once you’ve detoxed from the starch cycle and brought your body back to its natural metabolism, he says, you’ll be free of hunger pangs and afternoon sugar crashes and midnight munchies. It only takes fourteen days, as long as you follow one rule of thumb: nothing high-glycemic. Nothing that jacks your blood sugar, in other words, and causes insulin to start storing fat.”
Want to flip the fat-for-fuel switch? Two things: Train in your aerobic zone and eliminate high-glycemic foods—aka, no sugar, white flour products, etc. As McDougall puts it: No “fruit, breads, rice, potatoes, pasta or honey. No beans, which means no tofu or soy of any stripe. No chips, no beer, no milk or yogurt. No deli ham or roast beef, either, since they’re often cured in sugar.”
Want to burn fat for fuel and EASILY reach and maintain your optimal weight? Get your insulin under control. Easiest way to do that? Ditch the sugar and flour and, if you’re really feeling up for the experiment, play around with reducing ALL high-glycemic foods (while adding in healthy fats, tons of greens and veggies and adequate (but not crazy) protein and see what happens.
And remember this wisdom from UCSF researcher Robert Lustig in Fat Chance: “There is no fat accumulation without insulin. Insulin shunts sugar to fat. It makes your fat cells grow. The more insulin, the more fat, period. While there are many causes of obesity, excess insulin in some form is the ‘final common pathway’ for the overwhelming majority of them. Block it, and the fat cells remain empty.”
P.S. Maffetone LOVES walking as a super simple, super effective way to exercise. He’s also a big fan of breathing properly: “Of all the vital muscles necessary for optimal performance, perhaps the most important one is the diaphragm muscle.” See Optimal Breathing 101 for more there.
Don’t underestimate the therapeutic benefits of walking: it gently stimulates circulation and aerobic muscle fiber activity, is mentally beneficial (much like meditation), and can help redevelop the aerobic system.
The Most important piece of Equipment
“The most important piece of equipment is usually not thought of as equipment: your workout diary. It’s an item that can help you work out better, but it is more of a mental apparatus than a physical apparatus. A diary can be as formal as a special book you write in after each workout or as informal as notes on a separate calendar. Whatever form your diary takes, use it only for recording your workouts; don’t make it part of the family ‘to do’ list or your business diary.
Your workout diary should include (1) your primary and secondary goals, (2) your basic workout strategies, and (3) your day-to-day workout activities.”
Meet your #1 piece of equipment: your workout diary. Key components: Know your goals and strategy and track your progress. I just created my own. Here’s the quick peek:
Goals:
1. Feel energized TODAY!
<- That’s the ultimate workout “why” for me: To create the Energy that powers my Work + Love (+ Masterpiece Days) while keeping things simple within tight time constraints/not overtraining/etc.
2. World-Class Spartan Athlete
<- Challenges me to raise my standards and see what the best athlete version of me looks like
3. Spartan Race at 101
<- Reminder to train for longevity (aka health!) and not just fitness
Strategy:
Super basic: Trail every AM. Aerobic zone 5x/week + a couple mellow days. MAF tests monthly. Daily: 1 + 10 + 100 + 1,000 + 10,000 + Grip training: 11 = Move. + Eat. Sleep. Breathe. Etc.
… How about YOU? What goals would we see if we looked inside YOUR workout diary? And how about your strategies? And, most importantly, how about your next workout?
Here’s to building a super strong aerobic base and having fun Optimizing our athletic and energetic potentials!
I’m horrified at how poorly some people care for themselves. Then when they get older and dysfunctional, they want a magic pill to make them functional again. There’s no magic pill, but there’s something almost as good: good aerobic function. The time to act is now.
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