We know that being physically tired has a negative effect on our physical skills.
Climbing a cliff and trying to decide which spot to grab on next. Going for a three point throw in the last second of the game. Deciding on which door to choose when being chased by an angry mob of lactose intolerant dinner guests after you forgot you were not supposed to put cow’s milk in the lasagne.
Then there is the decline of cognitive skills. Stuff that we don’t normally associate with fitness. Deciding on how to disciplining your kids. Picking a meal for dinner. Managing people at work and not being a dick about it.
All of those skills are suboptimal when we get tired.
Some attack the issue by trying to improve the skill while tired so they can then mimic it in a real life situation. Anger management for tired parents, anyone?
And it will not work. Because, being tired has a negative effect on our cognitive and physical skills.
Practicing a skill while you’re tired doesn’t make you better at the skill. You can’t develop your interpersonal or physical skills when you’re exhausted. None of that practice will stick. That’s a fact that even Batman has to accept.
Others focus solely on improving the skill while feeling fresh. But, if you can shoot a three pointer and navigate interpersonal relationships with ease when you’re feeling at your best, it’s likely that working to improve the skill further is not the answer. You know how to do it. You already have it.
By now, you’ve probably figured what you need to do to not be a dick or perform dickishly when tired.
Don’t get as tired in the first place.
Elevate your health and fitness to a new level. So when it comes to go-time, the tiredness is not pulling your skills and decision making into the suboptimal abyss.
This applies to escaping an angry (and likely, farting) anti milk disaccharide digesting mob. As it does to being a calmer parent at the end of a long work day.
– J
ps. to all my fellow lactose intolerant friends, I say this. I feel you. Always double check with the lasagne maker before eating. And even then, proceed with caution.
Full disclosure: I stole the base idea of this from Brad Kaczmarski and then utilized some hacks introduced by Mike Boyle before adding couple of my favorite reset exercises from Original Strength and DNS to cap it off. This is the most efficient way of warming up and prepping the whole body for training session that I’ve come across so far. Best part is that it is done with absolute minimum equipment, all you need is a resistance band.
Here’s the rundown:
Start with a foam rolling by spending 30-60 seconds on any knots that you might have. If you are pressed for time just do thoracic extensions on roller and roll adductors, lats, quads.
1. Supine Leg Press
3 repetitions of 5 second exhales each leg alternating, hold the bottom position. Opposite knee bent and hip flexed to a minimum of 90 degrees.
Make the exercise harder by using a band on your feet for resistance. Make it easier by holding the bent leg with your hands.
2. Cook Hip lift
3×5 seconds exhales each leg, hold the top position. Press through the heel and have the opposite knee bent and hip flexed to a minimum of 90 degrees. Avoid forcefully jerking your butt off the ground.
Make it easier by holding the bent leg with your hands.
3. Supine Shoulder Flexion
3×5 second exhales with feet flat on the ground reach arms overhead and keep lower back flat on the ground.
Note: if you are unable to get arms overhead in this position without losing the ground contact with you lower back it’s worth spending some extra time on breathing drills and also releasing lats and upper back with the foam roller. To be safe avoid any overhead work until you can get the full range (arms overhead) with this exercise.
4. Quadruped Back Rock
3×10 reps rocking your butt to your heels.
5. Crawl. Baby/leopard/spider-man, depending on your level. When in doubt do baby crawl such as what I do in the video.
20 steps forward and back
6. Lateral Band Walk
10 steps to both directions. Hinge your hips back and avoid swinging your body from side to side. Think of it as Moonwalk (LINK) sideways, if I would only see you upper body it would look like you are gliding.
7. Sphinx Pose
3×5 seconds exhale and hold at the top. Remember to look straight ahead and feel the spot between and below your shoulder blades.
Make it harder by performing alternating arm slides or reaches to the side.
*Depending on a person’s results in the Functional Movement Screen, I might add a specific corrective in the beginning or at the end..
What ya think? Is it good or absolute crap? What do you do as a warm up?
Few years back I had the (almost) irresistible opportunity to get the latest Apple Watch for free. There were a lot of us, kind of like the right place at the right time sort of moment. Anyhow, all I had to do was to show up for training for an hour and the watch was mine.
I said no thanks. I didn’t have an iPhone, so it was a kind of pointless. Well, now I have the phone. And I would still say no thank you to the watch. But my beef is not with the Apple Watch or any other specific brand. Rather, it’s with most of the fitness trackers on the market.
The modern world has messed us up
We already have a disconnection with our bodies. We struggle listening to how our bodies are doing, how they’re feeling and how the last night’s cabbage casserole sits in our gut. Often we don’t know when we’ve had enough to eat. Let alone to drink.
We ignore the aches and pains by masking symptoms with medication, tequila and YouTube binges. Or we train through pain hoping that whatever made us ache will cure it. Sometimes it will, sometimes it can’t.
Having a fitness tracker on the wrist will only increase this void
Instead of asking ourselves if I feel like training today and waiting for an honest answer, we look at our fitness tracker to tell us how we feel based on whatever data it might have on us.
Instead of tuning in to our body to see if we should do a high-intensity kettlebell session or just go for a walk, we look at our watch. Instead of introspecting whether we’ve been active enough today, we look at our watch to see if we reached ten thousand steps.
Instead of listening to ourselves on our run and keeping the pace that feels moderate, we become fixated on the heart rate on the screen. We’re swapping a rejuvenating outdoor moment with more screen time.
So the fitness trackers adding to the disconnection with our bodies is the first issue. Ironically, the other beef I have with just smartwatches is the intensified connection we end up having with everything and everyone, but ourselves.
Smartwatches make us slaves
Both to technology and to other people’s agendas. However well meaning they might be. We’re always available for interruption. Notifications, phone calls, calendar alerts. The variety of apps for watches is ever expanding. And so there is always something to look up.
Something to check when we are overcome with the slightest feeling of frustration or boredom. Instead of allowing ourselves time and space to zone in with our mind and body, we scroll, tap and yell at our watch.
Yes, there’s ‘do not disturb’
There are all kinds of apps that block our access to apps and other functions we want to limit. But even when installed, most of us will get around them. We’re like teenagers evading our parental control settings. Except that we’re both the parent and the teenager.
Here’s an outstanding example
I asked my wife to set a password on my phone to block me from using the internet after 7pm. But I found a way to use the browser in a recipe app instead. The problem wasn’t the device itself. It was the fact that it was always next to me.
This didn’t change until I left my phone in another room, so getting online wasn’t as easy as picking up the phone. I know I wouldn’t have the self-control to not check my watch if it’s on my wrist. Hence I ain’t getting one.
Fitness trackers and smartwatches aren’t all bad
They might motivate an otherwise inactive person to complete their daily steps.
Seeing concrete numbers on the screen could act as a wake up call for some. If you constantly see visual reminders of how poor your sleep is, you might be more inclined to do something about it.
The big shifts in heart rate variability, temperature, breathing (do they tell that?) might give us clues how we’re about to come down with an illness before we feel a thing. Making us pull back on training and prioritising sleep and recovery to counteract whatever virus we’re fighting.
Now, a heart rate monitor on its own might be worth it
We can make our interval training super specific. Instead of going for time, we can go until we hit a specific heart rate. Then recover until we come down to a specific heart rate before going again. It’s hard to get a more specific conditioning session than that. And the numbers don’t lie. It’s hard to coast through a session. Something we all do now and then.
Then there’s the chance to keep your heart rate at a specific range throughout the cardio session instead of guessing if you’re there. However, as I mentioned earlier, I think this again pulls us away from “How do I feel? Am I going too fast, too slow, or is this just right for me today?”
An accurate heart rate monitor often requires a chest strap, so they’re usually only on you when training. Meaning that instead of adding more distraction to our days, we can leave the monitor in the drawer until we train next time.
But perhaps even a heart rate monitor is still an overkill for a general fitness trainee who wants to lose a bit of fat, get strong and live a long, active life. Unless you dig numbers. I tried using one about a decade ago, but got a little out of it.
I am currently re-reading a book calledEssentialism by Geoff McKeownand I can tell that it won’t be the last time either. It’s about finding what is essential in life and having the courage to remove and eliminate everything else that is distracting you. (more…)
“10 tips to lose fat, today!”, “15 tricks to beat the winter bloat!”, “8 secrets to a six-pack!”, “The reason your donkey escaped (even though you gave him plenty of hay)!”
I first entertained the idea of taking improv classes after hearing Jason Feruggia rave about it in his Renegade Radio – podcast. After for what felt like a lifetime of mental pulling and pushing and brain acrobatics, I signed up for classes at Improv Theatre Sydney in April 2017.
And I am forever grateful I decided to do it.(more…)
Last year I wrote a blog post called My Mostly Plant-Based Diet where in the end I wrote ” I am not trying to convince anyone to go plant based”. Now I’ve had another 12 months to live through the benefits of mostly plant-based diet. So before you read any further, this is the post where I am trying to convince you to reduce your meat eating habits. Not to be a vegan, but more plant orientated bipedal being. Fair?
And yes, it’s going to get heavy, perhaps evangelical, definitely emotional. You might feel weird feelings towards me after the reading this. Some of those weird feelings might be feelings of hate and loathing. Or maybe you’ll walk away enlightened. Yeah, that’d be cool.
Or, maybe, once it’s all said and done, you will hate my guts (and would like to eat them).
Why plant-based and not vegan or vegetarian?
As I said in my last year’s post, people love to put you in the box and judge your whole self based on the one thing you do:
“Right wing? You must love guns.” “Left wing? I bet you’re pro immigration.” “Vegan? You must love tofu. And you probably hate using deodorant. Is that weed?”
Now, I don’t know about you but I hate being in a box. And rarely eating meat and not being vegan gets people super confused. When my answer to “are you vegan” is somewhat elaborate, “no, but I eat mostly plant-based”, it’s hard for most to grasp. What confuses people even more is that, although I avoid most clothes with animal products I still own a pair of leather boots. I couldn’t bare the idea of buying more shoes made out of plastic.
So how do make decisions on whether I eat or don’t eat meat? Based on few things:
Who cooked the meat Mostly this doesn’t make any difference to my decision and I still stick to my plant-based eating. But, I can think of situations where I would rather eat what’s being offered instead of being stubborn about my ways: if I’d be visiting a foreign country and would be invited for a meal by a family for whom having meat would be luxury. Say they kill their only chicken to delight a foreigner with a fabulous meal. To sit at that table going “I really value the effort you are putting up because I am visiting, but unfortunately I can’t eat any of that, because I am vegan.”
Yeah, that would be elitist, and dickish.
The situation I am in My wife orders a meat dish and doesn’t finish it. I rather eat what’s left on her plate than throw it away. I mean, the animal is dead already. I don’t want it to die just so it could end up in the garbage bin. By eating the leftovers I feel like I respect the animals death more than by just chucking it out.
Where did the meat come from I have an issue with factory farming, both in terms of how animals get treated and what the farming does for the environment. So unless for some super-special circumstances (as above), I won’t eat meat that factory farmed using current operating standards.
But I have no issue occasionally eating wild meat that someone hunted. You go to the woods and kill an animal to eat. And the whole animal is used to either produce food, or other things, such as a carpet. Just so everything about the animal gets used. And when I say occasionally, I really mean super special occasions. Maybe once every year or two. Depending on how often your life is special and how many hunters you know.
Yeah I know, save me from the evils of hunting. I said mostly-plant based. It’s easier to convince 100 people to reduce their meat consumption that it is to make one hardcore vegan. That’s math.
Environmental impact of eating meat vs plant-based
The cost of producing meat
According to UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) raising livestock for meat, dairy and eggs utilises 70 percent of the world’s agricultural land, generating 14.5 percent of the greenhouse gases. In comparison, transportation generates 14 percent of the world’s greenhouse emission. Even worse, livestock generates methane which is worse than carbon dioxide that transportation emits.
And as livestock needs land to live on we can’t ignore the deforestation cows, sheep and whatnot need.
The cost of growing plants
The negatives of wheat, corn, nut and soy production
But not all plant-based eating is great for the environment either. And it often gets ignored because so much of the hype is on the havoc of livestock.
How to eat plant-based and not add to the environmental catastrophe happening today
Great neck. Great view. Great location to retrospect and refocus.
Note: This is a long post split into two parts. Part I is about reflecting and refocusing. Part II is The Best of 2017. Books, courses, gigs, music, the usual.(more…)
It’s been a while since I posted one of these. And as always, it goes all over the place. Training, life, health, writing, nuclear physics, dungeons & dragons…
It’s all in small snippets of text, making it a relatively easy read.
