“Get ready for high highs and low lows, and practice keeping yourself in the middle or you’ll never get [in to shape].”
1. Motivation = Decision before Action — Before the first step in the ten thousand mile journey, you must first decide to begin the journey.
2. Time: Pay yourself first. Take 60-90 minutes, same time, same place every day, and work out. This time includes warm-up,cool down, stretching, and commute time to plac of work out. RescueTime says you are only working 9-10 hours anyways. Don’t kid yourself, you have a lot of time to work out.
3. Exercise. What type of exercise should I do?: Run, Bike, or Swim as primary exercise. Strength & Flexibility is important, and discussed later.
4. Equipment: Trust your training, and trust your equipment. Buy from a local shop, where they are experienced and will remember your name.
5. Partner Up: Don’t workout alone if you don’t have to. Find someone who is in (slightly) better shape that is going solo — or find a group of friends to train with.
6. Training: ‘Showing Up is Not Half the Battle’ – Find a coach/mentor.
7. Strength & Flexibility: There’s a reason ‘core’ is called core – don’t shirk your core muscles (abdomen, obliques, lower back), stretch, and have a good strength training program. You don’t need a gym membership — but it’s easier to use weights than gravity, especially with core muscles.
8. Nutrition: ‘If the furnace is hot enough…”
9. Sleep — Sleep is a crutch — but a crutch your body (and mind) really need. Get at least 9 hours a day.
Journal — Keep detailed logs of how you felt, what you did, what you ate, and how much sleep you got. It’s good for both reflection and analysis, as well as sharing and review by coaching.
Final Words — Like ‘Kung Fu’ getting in shape will take time & effort. This is a journey, and it’s not a destination — it’s about your physical well being. Take it seriously. Have fun. Enjoy it with someone. But make the habit and routine, and repeat — whether 3, 4, or 6 days a week — and you will eventually achieve and maintain a high level of fitness.
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“-Get ready for high highs and low lows, and practice keeping yourself in the middle or you’ll never get good work done. You’re going to be pretty sure your company is dying at least once a month, and it usually isn’t. This is very important and very difficult to learn.” — Sam Altman, Loopt
While this, I think, is the greatest advice for any founder starting out, it also relates to exercise and fitness — you’re going to have great days , and you’re going to have some very, very bad days — if you can’t keep yourself in the middle, you are going to fail at this. It’s going to be way more than once a month when you think you can’t take it — it will be every day for the initial few weeks (and maybe months) while you get into shape. Ignore this chicken-little talk that the sky is falling, guys smarter than you predicted this months and years ago, focus on what’s within your power — getting in shape.
Before I say anything else, let me say this: I am not a doctor, a physician, a certified coach, trainer, or any other position that requires months/years of training and certification and tests. You should really have your own one of the above to give you counsel.
I’m an athlete. I used to be a pretty good one. Now I’m fat, out of shape, and on a mission to get back to (and indeed surpass) my previous fitness levels. This is my advice to those of you who are a)like me and used to be in great shape and aren’t anymore or b) have never been in great shape but would like to begin that journey. This isn’t for those planning to do a triathlon, run a marathon, or anything extreme like that.
I work on a start-up. Like many of you, I’ve a long list of excuses why I stopped working out regularly. The most common one was “I’ll do it later just as soon as I get this done.” Obviously, if you’ve gone to the school of procrastinators, you know, that means it doesn’t get done, not today, not tomorrow, not the next day. And then you end up like me, 12 months removed from having worked out seriously and regularly. Oh sure, I’ve played basketball, rugby, football, lifted weights, and pounded the elliptical in the last 12 months, but not regularly. You’re not gonna work out harder when you raise a Series A, M&A, or anything foolish like that. We’re workaholics by nature, and what’s not done daily, will never get done.
So, I decided a while ago, it’s time to get back in shape.
I’ve done this many times before. In fact, every year I ran track from high school to the D-I level, I had to go through hell and get back in shape. In high school, I played football, in college, I returned to training after a 6-month hiatus (I worked out, but it wasn’t training, per se) in the DR and the Amazon.
But this time was the worst. I was almost %133 my body weight when I was racing (195 lbs now, 150 lbs then), and while I’ve grown chunkier, I’ve lost muscle mass and traded it for flab. My resting heart rate was as low as 40 bpm, then it was about 70-80. (Heart rate is always a great metric for fitness — the less heart beats per minute, the stronger your heart is as it can push out the same amount of blood to your entire body with less effort. side note: I’ve heard a pound of fat= extra mile your blood has to travel. Not sure if this is true, but it certainly puts things into perspective)
I asked a good friend of mine, who didn’t run for 8 years after competing in college, before getting back into solid shape and running a marathon, what his advice was. “It’s going to suck. Once you get back in shape, never lose that fitness again.” For someone who has played sports (football, basketball, track and field, rugby, cycling, and later snowboarding) all his life, this wasn’t the most familiar position to be in.
If there’s any reconciliation, it’s that ‘I’ve seen this before.’ In OSUT, or the US Army’s basic training for grunts (read: infantry), I saw guys who couldn’t knock out one push up, run one mile in under 15 minutes, and knock out more than 5 sit ups, improve so greatly, that by the end of 13 weeks, were doing 40+ push ups, running 3-4 miles 7:00 min/mile pace, and rocking 50-60 situps. Now given, just because the APFT uses push ups, situps, and a 2-mile run as a metric, it doesn’t necessarily correlate with your quality/readiness to be a soldier — but we’re here to talk about fitness, and not infantry.
There’s a reason I’m talking about “fitness” and “getting in shape” and not, “get rock solid abs,” “bench press 300 pounds,” or anything stupid like that. Marathons and Triathlons are not even the goal here, they are truly not necessary, and frankly, not only are they not necessary, but I think many people underestimate the toll on the body uber-long distance events have.(I’ve biked 100 miles, and have run 15+ miles, so I have a tiny taste in my mouth). The goal is balance. No zen quotes from me here. But I know when I focus on work to the detriment of my body and spirit, things start to suffer, and life is not as fun. Your physical well-being should be sacred, late nights, 2-3 days not sleeping to nail a milestone, not withstanding.
Over the next two weeks, I’m going to expound on each of the aforementioned topics — all structured as a simple process to hacking your way to getting into shape. Hope you take this journey with me.
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