Hey there!
Hope you are having a pleasant weekend. I had a great Saturday - ran a class with Coach KK and learned some interesting things, saw a couple of friends, and had finished the day with an amazing evening with my wife where we just spent 4 hours talking with some wine present.
An interesting part of paying more attention to my day and week has been figuring out patterns to make good things happen more frequently and not-so-fun things happen less frequently. I keep thinking - can it be so simple? While it is nowhere near 100% success rate, I can see a steadily improving success rate. Whenever this makes more sense in my head, I hope to talk to you about it.
On to the 3 things for today.
on the magic ingredient
on greasing the groove and the Pushup Project
on finding your inner wolf
Before we start, I’d appreciate it if you can share ONE post of mine with ONE friend of yours. Seriously.
the magic ingredient
Over the years, I’ve been a part of a lot of successful journeys with my students. They’ve found new strengths and levels of fitness and health that they did not think possible. Some of them are crazy transformations that I feel truly humbled to have been a tiny part of it. All of them send us long communications with heartfelt emotions that give me goosebumps.
Being a part of their journey is what makes everything worth it. Waking up at 3.45 am is not a chore because it allows me to have a small impact in someone’s life. I don’t know where it could lead them, but I’ve seen in myself and in so many others that it can lead to crazy amazing places.
The magic ingredient in all of these success stories is the same.
It is not me. It is never me. Or my coaching. Or the information I provide. I try to be the best coach I can be to everyone I work with. With some people, I won’t deny it, it is easier. With some people, it is harder. That’s simply because we are different and unique humans - and I modify my coaching style as much as possible to ensure success.
But success comes by when they figure out the magic ingredient.
Photo by Adi Goldstein / Unsplash
That magic ingredient is them. It is YOU!
When you learn to take control of your life, of your failures, of your actions - things change. Listen, all of us have dysfunctional families, we have stressful jobs and days, we have assholes around us, and this issue and that problem and what-not. Everyone has it. It is what it is.
Once you realise that you have it in you to seize control, things change.
Yes, support systems matter. Yes, a better environment will change things. Yes, more money and access to better tools can change things. But none of them matter if you are not ready to own up and seize control.
The magic ingredient in all the success stories I’ve been a part of - it is you!
greasing the groove and the Pushup Project
Grease The Groove (GTG) training was introduced to me when I read Pavel’s original classic, Power to the People. Instead of trying to go for a linear progression where the weights get heavier and heavier steadily, you work on perfect form and technique with sub-maximal weights and keep making the reps.
The idea behind this is
our brain keeps learning success patterns.
our brain-body connection improves and things like myelination occur.
our nerves become super-conductors.
the amount of effort required to lift a certain amount of weight keeps reducing, and subsequently, the previous amount of effort we put in to lift that weight can now lift more weight.
If you think about the training we do at The Quad, most of the time it is GTG. This is one of the reasons we constantly coach perfect form and technique, and tell you to worry about the weights a lot lesser.
Slow and steady does indeed win the race!
You can work on GTG on almost any movement, and even have your entire training revolve around it. That said, we will need to occasionally and periodically actually lift heavy weights.
I’ve used GTG training to press half-bodyweight without doing that many heavy presses, and I’ve also used it to double kettlebell front squat 64 kgs for reps in the same fashion. It is so ridiculously easy that it feels like it should not work.
Recently, Coach KK used this with a bunch of his students to work on their pushups, and folks saw tremendous success with this project. It does require commitment - one needs to do 12 sets a day (how many reps and what variation is dependent on you) for about 5 weeks. The results were expected, and phenomenal. People improved their pushup volume by 20-80%, and quite a few people gained their first floor-pushup, having only worked on an elevated pushup during the entire duration of the training plan.
If this sounds interesting to you, register your interest here and we’ll give you a heads up when we open things up.
Think about this in your training. Especially now, a lot of us have access to only bodyweight or light bells, but that’s okay. Keep greasing the groove, focus on precise form and technique, and good things will happen.
on finding your inner wolf
Yellowstone national park was devoid of the grey wolf from around 1920 to 1995. The wolves were misunderstood and driven to extinction. Scientists re-introduced the wolf to Yellowstone in 1995 (41 wolves, to be exact) in the hope of seeing some change in the ecosystem, as well as letting the wolf come back to one of its natural habits. The wolves changed the ecosystem at such a crazy scale that its effects are still being felt and understood.
With the extinction of the wolf in Yellowstone, an apex predator, the elk started to thrive. Their population grew unabated, which resulted in them over-grazing. They started consuming more water, and the entire habitat started to shift towards imbalance. Grazing too much meant a huge reduction of shrubs and foliage. Which in turn meant smaller animals had lesser shelter from their predators - rabbit population, for example, started to fall. The streams and river changed course, beaver population fell, trees grew lesser, and the entire habitat became unstable.
Introducing 41 wolves changed the course of Yellowstone. Because the wolf is a keystone species - capable of bringing an enormous cascade of change in the entire system. Way beyond what we can compute.
What does a wolf have to do with anything? Like a keystone species, we can develop a keystone habit.
Regular activity or exercise is one such keystone habit. When we start to exercise, what happens is
we start to eat better. We want to eat better. The amount of junk automatically goes down because we like the feeling of feeling good.
we start to sleep better. As our hormonal system starts to work better, and we exert ourselves through regular exercise, sleep becomes more natural.
our mental alertness improves. As little as 30 minutes of exercise a day has shown remarkable improvements in cognition and work productivity.
our mood improves.
our gut health starts to recover, as our eating and sleeping patterns are improving. This leads to a whole other cascade of health benefits.
All of this from just starting a fitness routine. This is why it is critical that we find something, anything that we can enjoy. Rather than the most intense workout there is that will burn all the fat along with the rest of your face off. The point is not the intense workout at all. The point is the habit. The point is the mental recalibration of how you think about yourself. The point is the cascade of routines this is going to start.
Crazy, right?!
You can read the longer version here.
That’s it for today. Have a great Sunday!
