Most people know Tony Robbins as a motivational speaker. But one of his biggest talents and gifts to the world is his ability to take deep dives on subjects that are critical for our success, and give us playbooks we can follow in order to master them.
He did it for financial health with his last book – Money: Master The Game – and he’s done it again this time for physical health with Life Force.
Tony’s original teacher was Jim Rohn, and he used to say “Let your learning lead to action, and you’ll create an extraordinary life.”
So that’s exactly what we’ll do with this summary. We are taking a 700 page book and boiling it down to 7 steps you can take to create a transformation in your physical health.
Step 1: Decide and Get The Information You Need
The first step in any journey is to decide exactly what you want. So, before you move on to the rest of this summary, take a minute and think about what your ultimate physical state looks like.
Do you want to have more energy in your day to day activities? Do you want to increase your strength? Do you want to be more flexible and nimble? Do you want to feel youthful again?
Once you’ve decided what you want, the second step is to start gathering the information you need in order to help you on your journey. As a heads up, there are a lot of steps in here that you might want to ask your doctor about before you jump in.
With that disclaimer out of the way, here are some of the tests you can do to start taking control of your physical health.
- Toxic Metals: a lot of the food we eat can cause dangerous levels to accumulate in your body;
- Hormones: keeping them in balance can make a huge difference in how you feel day over day;
- Cancer: GRAIL is an early detection test that can detect over 50 forms of cancer. A combination of this and a full body MRI can give you the best chance of knowing whether or not you have something to worry about.
- Heart: get a CCTA test done so you know exactly where your cardiovascular health is at, and the steps you need to take to stay heart healthy in the future;
- Alzheimer’s: get a test to know whether or not you are genetically predisposed to this awful disease, which will allow you to come up with a plan to reduce your risk;
- Biological age: this test will tell you what your “biological age” is. As an example, Tony is 62 years old chronologically, but only 51 years old biologically.
Step 2: Review Your Education
Taking control of your physical health includes staying up to date on the latest advances in medicine and science.
With that beings said, there are a number of promising tools being developed that, at the very least, you should educate yourself on. It’s beyond the scope of this summary to give you that education, but we can point you in the right direction to start your own deep dive.
Here are some places to start.
- Stem Cells: this is a controversial topic, but something you should educate yourself on because of it’s staggering potential. For instance, they have helped people regain their use of their arms and legs after strokes or severed spinal cords, helped people recover from injuries like torn ligaments, and even helped children with leukemia go into remission;
- Anti-Aging Techniques: do some further research on lifespan and aging with the book Lifespan by Dr. David Sinclair, who is a tenured Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and an expert researcher in the field of longevity;
- Gene Therapy and CRISPR: gene editing techniques are helping to fix damaged hearts, restore impaired vision, eliminating Alzheimer’s related anxiety, and has the potential to block the aging process itself;
- Focused Ultrasound: this incisionless brain surgery has the potential to heal Parkinson’s symptoms and even opioid addiction.
Take a deeper dive into some or all of these areas so that when you, or somebody you love, is dealing with issues that seem to have no hope, you can point them in the direction of promising tools.
Step 3: Maximizing Energy and Regeneration
There are a lot of vitality increasing and lifespan extending remedies available on the market right now for those who are willing to take action. Here are just a few of them.
- Hormone Optimization Therapy: optimal hormonal balance is critical to a healthy lifespan, and they can be supplemented to optimal levels, having a life-changing impact.
- Peptides: these are bioactive molecules that build lean muscle mass and revitalize sexual desire and function in both men and women;
- NAD+ supplements: these are helper molecules found in every cell in our body, but by middle age we have lost about half of our reserves. Taking supplements can help restore your energy and vitality.
Step 4: Create a Plan for Sleep and Living Pain Free
There are 3 pillars of your health. Diet and exercise get the most attention, but the third pillar – sleep – has an enormous impact on the other two. It affects how your diet gets processed, or whether you feel like exercising at all.
It’s critical to treat your sleep as important as your diet and exercise, and we all know that if we don’t have a plan for those two things, we get off track rather easily.
Here are two easy things to consider doing now:
- Schedule: schedule at least seven hours of sleep a night, and make it non-negotiable;
- Track: tracking the quality of your sleep with an AI device will give you feedback on how to improve it.
Now let’s move on to pain. At some point in your life, you or someone you love will have to deal with pain in their body. It’s estimated that twenty percent of the population will deal with some form of chronic pain during their lifetime.
Luckily for us, there are many tools you can explore using that will help alleviate your pain, sometimes permanently.
Here are some things to consider exploring:
- PEMF: pulsed electromagnetic field therapy, the impact of which has been demonstrated in thousands of studies;
- Egoscue Method: this is a type of “postural therapy” which is designed to get rid of chronic pain that results from everything from sports injuries to car accidents;
- Counterstrain: this is a painless and quick therapy that uses passive body positioning of spasmed muscles and dysfunctional joints towards positions of comfort;
Step 5: Devise Your Maximum Longevity Lifestyle
Changing your day to day routine and building in preventative measures is one of the most impactful things you can do to improve your long-term health.
Here are some things you can start doing today that will make a huge difference.
- Live foods: you already know this, but eating more whole and live foods, and cutting out processed foods (especially sugar) has a dramatic impact on your health. Consider doing a 10-day cleanse to break your current pattern and reset your system;
- Cut calories: in addition to eating healthier, it’s likely that you should be eating less. Can you find 300 calories to cut out of your diet? That’s the amount of calories in a single bagel. Consider looking at tools on the market that can help curb your appetite like Plenity, or tools that shut off the hormone that creates hunger like Wegovy.
- Environment: one of the easiest ways to change your behavior is to change your environment. Put more good foods in your path, and make unhealthy foods harder to see (or better yet, just throw them out completely);
- Caffeine: for me you can put this in the “a snowball’s chance in hell” column, but you can consider cutting back on you caffeine intake;
- Hydration: you’ve heard this before, but increasing your water intake to half your body weight in ounces to increate your hydration levels is a good thing to do;
- Breathing: consider using the 1-4-2 breathing pattern, where you inhale for 1 part, hold for 4 parts, and exhale for 2 parts, which will help you relax and move your lymph;
- Temperature shock: consider tapping into the power of heat and cold to give your body a healthy shock that helps you extend your lifespan and protect yourself from disease.
Of course, you are not going to adopt all of these practices at the same time. But taking them on, one-by-one, over a long period of time, will help you make the changes you need in order to increase your lifespan considerably.
Best of all, most of the suggestions in this section are free.
Step 6: Creating Your Fitness Plan
There’s something you can do (I don’t want to spoil the surprise, but it’s exercise) in just a few minutes a day that will:
- Reduce your risk of cancer by 40%;
- Lower your risk of having a stroke by 45%;
- Decrease your risk of diabetes by 50%;
- Cut your risk of premature death from heart disease by 50%; and
- If you are a woman, protect you from osteoporosis.
If you haven’t guessed what that is yet, it’s exercise. Just fifteen minutes a day is enough to increase your life expectancy by three years on average.
You probably already know that exercise helps keep your weight down and is good for your heart. But what researchers are starting to figure out is that muscle mass is just as important to health as blood pressure and how much you weigh.
The key is to find the right dose of exercise effort, and to make to make it both fun and easy to do.
Here are a few things to consider doing:
- Walk and Work: there are days where Tony will walk while he’s working for up to four hours a day, logging fifteen miles in the process. Can you take some of your calls while walking? If it’s in your budget, consider a treadmill desk;
- OsteoStrong: this is a machine and workout that strengthens your entire musculoskeletal system in a single workout that lasts less than ten minutes. Even better, you only need to do it once a week in order to see results;
- Core Four: Billy Beck III, one of the most popular personal trainers on the planet, suggests focusing on a minimum of the following four exercises: squats, lunges, pushups, and planks. His best piece of advice? Start with one squat if you have to, and then consistently do more over time.
- Make it a Game: one of the best strategies for finding an exercise habit that sticks is to make it a game. As virtual reality tools continue to develop and become more affordable, this will be one of your secret weapons in building a healthy lifestyle.
Step 7: Take Control of your Mind
A plan for health wouldn’t be complete without addressing the most powerful tool you have at your disposal – your mind.
Here are some tools and techniques you can use to sharpen it.
- Priming: most of us wake up sluggish and overwhelmed with what the day will hold. Priming can help you quickly break that pattern by adjusting your thoughts and emotions so you can start your day in a peak state. Tony has an exercise you can do at TonyRobbins.com/Priming;
- EFT/Tapping: this is a combination of ancient Chinese acupressure and modern psychology;
- A Beautiful State: consider what your life would be like if you committed to, no matter what happened, to stay in a state of love, joy, happiness, appreciation, gratitude, or playfulness? Just like in meditation, the trick here isn’t to always be in a beautiful state, but noticing when you are not and then doing what you need to do to return to it. Here’s one way to do it: when you find yourself feeling frustrated, angry, or upset, find something to be grateful for in the situation (really), and then get to work on solving it.
Conclusion
These seven steps contain a lot of information, and it would be impossible for you to take them all on at once. But what you can do is choose one of the seven areas, make a commitment to explore one of the items in one of those areas, and get to work on implementing just one simple change you can make today.
It will ultimately lead you down a path to greater health, more vitality, and a longer life.