Podbit · The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Pilates builds muscle endurance and is excellent for pelvic floor health and posture — but it doesn't load bones or build muscle mass at the level needed to prevent osteoporosis and age-related decline. Women who do only Pilates are likely to look slim in their 40s and face serious structural deficits in their 60s.
Where this was said
At 1:16:45 · chapter starts 1:07:24
Dr. Estima introduces the X-plank — a side plank with the top leg raised and held for 30 seconds — as a simultaneous test and treatment for hip stability. If you can't hold it, that's the thing you train. Steven attempts it on camera with visible difficulty, eventually managing a modified knee version, illustrating that many people's glute medius and hip stabilisers are undertrained. The floor sit-to-stand test (crossing feet, standing without hands) is then used to assess ankle mobility, quad strength, and hip extension capacity — with Dr. Estima noting that cultures where floor sitting is habitual have near-zero fall rates. The chapter closes with a rapid rundown of bodyweight fundamentals: push-ups, squats, glute bridges, and loaded lunges with household items like pet food bags.
The female pelvic floor hammock is already under more mechanical stress than a man's — it has three openings instead of one. Add pregnancy, relaxin, the weight of a baby, and childbirth, and the result is a structure that needs careful, progressive rehabilitation rather than a race back to heavy lifting.
Self-help fails because people are sold one universal cure by the hyper-responders who had a transformative result from it. The real problem is context: every method works for the right person at the right time, which is almost never you just because the author says so.
Spencer Greenberg was once so socially anxious his heart pounded just approaching a stranger. His therapist gave him homework: go to a bar alone, talk to 5 strangers. Starting with asking for the time, he worked up to asking men for hugs — and his anxiety fell dramatically in 6 months.
A person who flies regularly but obsessively checks weather forecasts before every flight is not doing exposure therapy — they're teaching their brain that flying is only safe with the ritual. Safety behaviors prevent the brain from ever learning that the feared thing is actually fine.
The worry-time technique assigns all worries to one scheduled slot (e.g. 5 PM). Every time a worry surfaces, you write it down and ban yourself from engaging with it until that time. When 5 PM arrives, most worries feel trivial and the act of batch-worrying exposes how little it actually accomplishes.
In a randomized study of 20 habit techniques, 'habit reflection' stood out: recall a past habit you successfully built, write down what helped you succeed, then apply those same strategies to your new habit. It works because it's self-adapting — it uses whatever worked for YOU.
The tiny habits technique — always having a minimal version of your habit you can do when life gets in the way — keeps the mental machinery of habit formation from breaking. Paradoxically, people given a tiny-habit fallback option were MORE successful at the full habit, not less.
Fears and worries act like playground bullies — they want to ambush you. But when you deliberately seek them out and choose the time of engagement, they lose their power. The volitional act of starting the fight on your own terms is one of CBT's most underappreciated insights.
Most downtime defaults are things you regret immediately after — phone scrolling, binge TV. 'Glad you did it' activities meet the same need for rest but leave you feeling like you spent your time well. The switch from a bad screen to a documentary, a book, or a walk costs almost no extra effort but compounds into identity over time.
You rarely control your first reactive thought. But you can train your second thought — the response to the trigger — by asking whether your initial reaction is the most helpful one and replacing it with something equally true but more constructive. Over time, that second thought becomes automatic.
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