Hey there!
Apparently, it is November already. Crazy.
With recurring lockdowns and vaccine information and well, all sorts of confusing news as always, I constantly remind myself that I should not be setting a timeline for “when things go back to normal”. For one, who knows what normal means anymore. And second, it means we stop waiting for things and we can continue working on our controllable. Listening to my own advice is hard but as I write this, I hope I hear it loud and clear.
On to the 3 things for today:
the most important and impactful hour (as pertains to my health and fitness).
3 quotes for this week that made me think.
how to get to have 60 minutes/day for your health and fitness.
If you like reading any of these posts, do use the “Share” button below the post and it will share the longer version of it from my blog (and not this excerpt). I sincerely appreciate it.
the most important and impactful hour of the week
I am not someone with infinite discipline or willpower. You'd be hard-pressed to find someone with a bigger sweet tooth than me.
I am not a great cook. I cannot just whip a delicious meal out with 1.3 ingredients in 8 minutes and be done with it.
I am fine eating the same thing for lunch about 5 days of the week (scrambled eggs) but every 6 months, I lose all interest in eggs.
And like most of you, I always lose the plot later in the day - dinner!
The most important hour is not at the gym. Not the day when I lift the most weights or do the hardest metcon there is and lie gassed after.
It is the hour that my wife and I spend discussing the menu for the week. Every Sunday afternoon, we write things down on our whiteboard. And as we write the menu, we look at what groceries need to be ordered.
So, every morning, my day’s eating is already settled. Including the days we are going to order in. This means that's one less thing to negotiate or worry about. Instead, now you just do.
The intent has already been clarified, which is most of the battle.
Don’t have an hour to do this? Don’t worry, I got you covered. The third article for today will tell you how to make that happen.
3 quotes that make my head spin
I love these quotes. Reading them is one thing. Understanding them is another. Applying them is a whole other matter!
If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the people to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast endless sea.
- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
This one’s constantly on my mind because I want to help my students fall in love with fitness. I want you to have what I have.
And I know when you say you want to lose 5 kilos, you want what that results in - not the weight loss but what that makes you feel like. Even if you don’t know it.
So, how do I teach you to yearn for the vast endless sea - that’s my progression as a coach as well.
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Absorb what is useful, discard what is useless and add what is specifically your own.
- Bruce Lee
This definitely applies to everything I write. You need to figure out what this means for you. Don’t take anything I say too literally.
* * * * * * * * * *
I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else’s; it’s always what I’ve already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It’s only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea. By giving my brain a chance to make associations, draw connections, take me by surprise.
- William Deresiewicz
Whenever I read, I get a bunch of ideas. And until I read this quote, it never struck me why those ideas took time to percolate. Many times, I’d write down a bunch of thoughts and the next morning, a lot of them would sound silly. But occasionally, as my subconscious worked its way through one of them, they come back as a much better and applicable idea.
This quote affirmed this for me. It told me that it is fine for that to happen. And in fact, I can set things up so that I enable this to happen.
how to carve out 60 minutes/day for your health and fitness
showing up is 80% of the battle.
if you don’t show up to the gym, then what use is the training plan you have printed out that apparently all the celebrities are doing to get ripped?
worry less about crazy diets and puke-your-guts-out workouts and more about showing up.
slowly build up the amount of time you can spend on your health and fitness, over the course of a week.
and not all of it has to be spent on physical activity. in fact, my most impactful hour is on Sundays when I plan my weekly menu. When I made time for that, things got easier.
I am a big believer in process and effort, over results. To be clear, it is something I struggle with constantly. But I try to listen to my own advice on this and keep repeating it and just plodding along.
what does "effort" mean?
I have 8 steps below and depending on where you are, start at the appropriate step. To do this, you start by looking at how many minutes you spent dedicated to your fitness routine over the last month.
Some guidelines:
Don't skip a step.
Spend 2 weeks per step. Longer is fine.
You move on to the next step when you are able to hit 80% compliance or better.
Here’s are the steps:
15 minutes/day, 3 days of the week. That's 45 minutes per week.
15 minutes/day, 7 days of the week. That's 105 minutes per week.
30 minutes/day for 3 days of the week AND 15 minutes/day for the other 4 days of the week. 150 minutes per week.
30 minutes/day, 7 days of the week. 210 minutes.
45 minutes/day for 3 days of the week AND 30 minutes/day for the other 4 days of the week. 255 minutes.
60 minutes/day for 3 days of the week AND 30 minutes/day for the other 4 days of the week. 300 minutes.
60 minutes/day for 3 days of the week AND 45 minutes/day for the other 4 days of the week. 360 minutes.
60 minutes/day for 7 days of the week. 420 minutes.
Some further clarifications:
There are a lot of in-between steps i.e. you can go from step 1 to step 2 by adding 1 day of activity per week and thus taking an entire month to get there. Which is absolutely fine and in fact, might be a better way of going about it.
You can stop at whatever step you'd like. The point is not to go to step 8 but to figure out which is the right step for you.
You can always take a step back when you need to. When there's more time available in your schedule, you can be at step 6 and then when things get hectic you can step back to #4.
There are hundreds of permutations and combinations as well. For example, 3 days of 60 minutes and 4 days of 15 minutes. You go to the gym and lift weights 3 days of the week and you spend 15 minutes on the other days doing stretching and foam rolling and all the fun recovery work. This is what I tend to do for the most part.
And the most important bit, there’s no step #0. Our biggest issue is always trying to zoom up to step 8 and then falling back to 0 in a few weeks, when the steam runs out.
No more step #0!
Thanks for reading/listening. I’ll see you next week.
You have a great Sunday and a fun week ahead.
