Optimize Yourself: Health in the Film Industry

You probably know Zack Arnold from his work as an editor (Burn Notice, Empire, briefly on Glee) or as a producer (Go Far) or even from his advice when he talked to us about success in post production. But another thing Zack is passionate about is health- especially for people in demanding, sedentary careers, like in post production. We talked to him about his program, Optimize Yourself (currently transitioning from ‘Fitness in Post’).

Q: What is the problem that you’re trying to solve with Optimize Yourself, and how are you solving it?

A: Basically with the Optimize Yourself program, the problem that I see that I’m trying to solve is that tech workers, and when I say tech workers I include editors, I include composers, graphic designers, animators, programmers, coders- people where their entire life is lived behind a computer in a sedentary space for long hours during the day- we are becoming the new blue collar workers. If you look at the statistics the amount of people that are actually doing physical work in our country, wether they’re farmers, they’re working as factory, they’re ditch diggers, whatever it is, they’re by far the minority, and the vast majority of people in our country right now live a sedentary lifestyle behind a computer. For some people, that’s just going to cause some weight gain, and basically it’s the work scene disease, and that’s for a reason because it leads to a host medical problems.

What I’m specifically trying to focus on is how bad this lifestyle is for a person’s creativity, because we’re not just people that are sedentary behind a desk. We have to make very intense creative decisions, and the brain sucks up a tremendous amount of energy from the body, so essentially the human brain is between three and five percent of your overall body weight, but it sucks up 20 to 25 percent of your energy, burns your calories. Even though you’re sitting all day long, you’re not doing anything, at the end of the 12 or 16 hour day, you collapse, and you’re like, “Oh my God. Why am I so exhausted? I didn’t do anything all day long. This is what I should feel like if I exercise intensely for two hours and I’m just wiped out.”

 

“We have to make very intense creative decisions, and the brain sucks up a tremendous amount of energy from the body…”

It’s because your brain is spinning so much, but nobody has figured out how do you turn your environment where you have to be creative and energetic into a space where you can also be active, because we have this “all or nothing” mentality, mostly because of the media and because of the multi billion dollar fitness and nutrition industry saying that you have to do a 90 day, crazy exercise program. You have to get a gym membership. You have to do a deprivation diet. But in out industry and in the lifestyles that we have, we don’t have extra time to go to the gym, and that’s not an excuse anymore, that’s a reality. If you have kids and a family and you work a 12 to 14 hours day, and you commute for two hours, and you want to see your family for an hour, and you want to sleep for seven or eight hours, 24 hours gone. Disappeared.

So where do you have to drive to the gym, to spend time cooking a nice meal, whatever it is. It’s almost impossible to find any sense of better health and a healthier lifestyle while you’re trying to balance it with this industry. Rather than having all of these resources that require extra time, that require life outside of your work environment, I’m trying to bring better health to the work environment so you can increase your energy and your creativity and become more productive without having to carve out an extra two hours a day, either for a gym or for help cooking, for whatever it is. You can combine all these ideas of high performance and athletics, and put it right in your work environment, so that way at the end of the day you’re like, “I guess I could go to the gym, but why? I’ve got 15,000 steps and I feel great.”

 

“I’m trying to bring better health to the work environment so you can increase your energy and your creativity and become more productive without having to carve out an extra two hours a day”

That’s kind of the idea behind what I think the problem is and what needs to be solved, and what I have been doing to solve it, and I have a long ways to go, but I basically combine my 10 to 15 years of knowledge in high performance athletics and martial arts, in yoga, in meditation, I’ve done research, neural science, and I’m a total nutrition junkie. I love the science of nutrition. I love learning about sleep, and I love constant productivity and learning how to manage your time and your energy properly. I’ve been creating both online learning courses, if people want to go deeper, I’ve been doing expert interviews with people on my podcasts, so I can take these ideas that are more prevalent and common in the health and fitness industries, but bring them to a creative industry and blend them all together. So the only answer is not, “Well, I have to go to the gym.” Because it’s just not a realistic expectation anymore.

Q: I know you have a ton of products that you recommend and a bunch of pieces of advice, but if somebody could do just one thing, if you had just one piece of advice, what would be your top thing to do to try and combat the health problems that we’re facing?

A: Rather than saying, “We’ll get this tool, or make this one change.” you want to take the challenge and ask yourself a question that you would not normally ask, which is, “Given my work environment, what would it take to become at least twice as active as I am now?” Let’s just use the magic number of 10,000 steps. I believe the place to start is movement. If you have to do a total overhaul of your health, but you’re like, “What’s the one thing I need to do?” I think you need to move more. I think that getting better sleep, that’s great, eating better, that’s great, being more productive, that is great, but you need to be moving, because the human body is designed to move.

 

“You need to be moving, because the human body is designed to move”

Ask yourself the question, “What would it really take to get 10,000 steps everyday?” That’s the one thing I would do to start, and if you’re like, “Well I have no idea how many steps I hit now, and I don’t know how much I move.” Well guess what, that means one thing you need to do is start tracking your activity so you have a base. Once you’ve done that, what I’ve seen from people where they don’t want to start the crazy programs, they don’t want to do the deprivation diets, and they don’t want to get a gym membership, I say, “Just get something to track your activity.” Soon as they have the awareness, and the key word is awareness, once they are aware of how little they actually move throughout the day, something shifts in their brain. They’re like, “Wow. I need to make a change.”

Then they start taking that road, that journey towards living a more active life during my work day, as oppose to after my work day is complete. If anything, the one change I guess would be, make sure that you understand and have a baseline measurement on how active or sedentary you actually are, so you develop awareness. Then you can start making choices from there.