Aaron Mckenzie from Origin of Energy joins me to talk about exercise, functional movement, and your wellbeing. We chat about how an exercise program needs to be anti-fragile to build resilience into your life. The importance of hydration and quality salt. The role of nutrition in any wellbeing program and how having a strong supportive community around you makes all the difference.

I talk about Aaron in my book, A Life Less Stressed, and his approach to health and wellbeing. He is an inspiration to me and many others and has certainly changed (and liberated) my approach to exercise and functional movement.

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Dr. Ron Ehrlich:                   Hello and welcome to Unstress, I'm Dr. Ron Ehrlich.

Movement, look, it's such an important part of keeping healthy throughout each and every day. Now I want to share with you a short calculation of how much time we have to move or be still in a week in all our lives.

Stay with me on this one. You may need a pen and paper.

Now, there are 168 hours in a week. Say, you spend eight hours a night sleeping, and incidentally, I don’t believe that’s optional, it's a biological necessity. It's your life support system but we've talked about sleep elsewhere. That’s 56 hours of sleep a week, but you're not moving so that leaves 112 hours, waking hours. Now if you think going to the gym for three or four times or hours per week doing a repetitive activity is going to do it for you, I think you need to think again and many of us are spending a lot of time sitting.

My guest today is one of Australia's, if not the world's leading personal trainers. Aaron Mckenzie. Now like many of us that face challenges, Aaron's passion sprang from a desire to overcome his own health issues and a constant drive to learn more that allowed him to achieve optimal performance. He runs his gym in Sydney and has trained elite athletes as well as guiding people like me and, hopefully, you.

Now, I've always enjoyed exercise but I've known Aaron for almost 10 years and he's inspired me. I mentioned that in my book, and I wanted to share him with you today. He's been working as a personal trainer for almost 20 years, throughout that time developing a holistic model for movement and health, integrating sustainable lifestyle changes, coupled with practical, functional … That means every day … movements in his programs.

The thing I've always found so inspiring about Aaron is the way he combines breathing, nutrition, and movement into his functional movement programs and that is not just the movement of muscles but all the tissues of the body, cardio, respiratory, digestive, lymphatics.

Now here's some insights that Aaron shares and I thought I'd share with you. He says, "Gym equipment's overrated." People spend too much time traveling to gyms and what they get there, they perform inefficient training. People spend too much money on unused gym memberships … I think we can all relate to that … motivational trainers, training trends, as opposed to movement coaches, not to mention unused personal gym equipment.

People need to learn how to feel and move their body, not sit on machines. Coaching needs to be focused on improving the individual's movement capacity, not motivating people into lifting too heavy, too fast, or getting too fatigued.

Now we'll also talk about daily activity and embracing three key movements. That’s the way to go and we'll try to build them into a daily routine with slow controlled diaphragmatic abdominal breathing. Now breathing is one of those pillars. The five pillars: sleep, breathe, movement, nourish, and thought. The thing I love about Aaron's approach, he's always learning and he's constantly evolving and looking for a balance and I love this term that Aaron uses to describe movement, "Nurture the body."

Wow, who would have thought? I'm actually doing more of my own workouts now at home, myself,