July 16, 2024

A few days ago, I ran across a documentary about how the food industry and the pharmaceutical industry have dominated the political system and, according to the presenter, are destroying the health of the nation. It was a pretty compelling story. The problem is what does it have to do with my business and my life? I already know a lot of the things that they discussed. I am quite careful with my diet and keep away from Big Pharma unless I am truly sick. This documentary was a distraction. It is disturbing and a bit frightening but not something that I can change or influence. Of course, I might become a crusader against these people but that is not likely.

Here is something we need to think about. How much time do each of us spend on distraction? Ten percent of our time? Fifty percent? Get out your handy notebook and start recording what you do and how much time you spend doing it. I bet you will be surprised. Even at work we spend an enormous amount of time not doing what we are paid for but being distracted. With the dominance of the internet and social media apps our lives are full of distraction. By the way, talking to your friends on social media is not important. It is a distraction.

A useful distinction, made by the brilliant Steven Covey, is the concept of circles of influence vs circles of concern. A circle of influence is the events that we can influence directly. It is the stuff we can do something about. A circle of concern are the events that we are ‘concerned about’ can’t influence or change. In other words, it is the place where we can be emotionally stirred up with no ability to influence those events. What Covey found out was that most people spend more than 50% of their time in their circle of concern. In other words, they spend most of their time worrying about things they can’t change. Conversely, successful people spend more than 70% of their time on their circle of influence; the things they can change.

How do you change those percentages for yourself? First, as I mentioned above, find out how much time you spend in your circle of concern. Monitor this activity and be brutally honest with yourself. The way you separate the concern from influence is comparing your activities to how much they support your goals. You should have a strategic plan of the major goals in your life. And you should have a daily plan that supports the work towards those goals. If you have all of this and your actual time spent on activities, you know how much time you spend on your goals and how much on distraction. This detail becomes your moment-by-moment way to handle distraction. When you want to take a break i.e. be distracted you consciously choose to do it. But you set a firm limit on that distraction. We all know that our ‘little breaks’ take up a lot more time than we think. Monitor your time carefully by keeping good records, especially your distractions.

 We all have a certain amount of time. We don’t know how much that is. Spending it on things that don’t move you forward is a waste of a life. Remember, even five minutes spent on moving forward to your goals is worthwhile.

To a productive life!

Cliff

July 3, 2024

We are all busy. Our days and minutes are filled with commitments to work and family. Exercising, for most of us, is a task we easily can skip. We have to change clothes. It makes us sweaty and sometimes tired. If we have a mediocre day, it brings our mood lower. So how do I commit to it daily?

Here is a trick. You commit to five minutes of exercise each day. You put it in your schedule and do it every day. But five minutes is nothing you say. Well, 5 minutes a day is 35 minutes a week. It is 140 minutes for a four-week month and 1680 minutes for a year. That isn’t nothing. What can I do in five minutes? You can do a down dog with variations, Zhan Zhaung for 5 minutes, the opening sequence in Tai Ji or any 5-minute sequence in Tai Ji, the first two exercises in the eight brocades, the first two lines (3 times each) of 64 Hands, 3 100-yard sprints with a short rest between each sprint. Only your creativity limits you. And here is the payoff; the mental resistance to starting your exercise is mostly gone. It is a trick because the real resistance to exercise is starting. Once you start you may continue. My experience is that 4 out of 7 days you will exercise more than the 5-minute commitment. And when your day has been packed from beginning to end you can find some exercise to do for 5 minutes before you fall into bed.

Do yourself a favor; commit to the 5-minute rule every day.

To the joy of movement,

Cliff

Becoming a person who is motivated every moment requires a transformation from where you are right now. This kind of positivity of outlook transformed into action is just not an accepted part of our daily life. Most of us spend a lot of time drinking coffee while on our phones, complaining about the world (mostly things we can’t change or have no influence on), daydreaming about how we want our life to be and complaining about our spouse or significant other. We sleepwalk through life wishing we could be healthier, in better shape and attractive to the people we are attracted to. We know we can have a better life, but we don’t know how to get there. The motivate button just doesn’t work.

There is a wonderful movie that brings all of this to a sharp focus called Stranger Than Fiction. It stars Will Ferrell, Emma Thompson, Dustin Hoffman and Maggie Gyllenhaal. Harold Crick is an IRS agent (played by Will Ferrell) who goes through life like a robot. He has a moment to moment routine that lets him get through the day. He has one friend but no one else. His life is joyless and dull. He is dull. One cannot imagine that he would ever become inspired to do anything more than his daily dullness. Then, a miracle happens. One day while counting the number of brush strokes as he brushes his teeth, he hears someone narrating his life. He stops in mid brush and tries to find the person speaking to him. But it is a woman’s voice, and no one answers as he asks, ‘who is there?’ This goes on for a couple of days with the narration going on off and on. Then one day he hears this magic phrase, “Little did he know that this few minutes’ error in his watch would insure his death.” All of a sudden Harold Crick wakes up. Doom is staring him in the face. This leads him into frenetic activity to try to stave off his death. I won’t go into the whole plot. It is full of humor and subtlety and pathos.

For us the key is the motivational trigger. A few simple words transform a walking, talking robot into a man filled with purpose and desire. The internal energy he generates ends up changing who he is and what he does. Harrold must change who he is to save his life. He may not succeed but if he doesn’t change, he will surely die. Most of us don’t face that kind of motivational necessity. The issue is that to get to our better life we have to raise our internal energy high enough to overcome the barriers that our current existence creates. It is like this. You are going down an alley. In the middle of the alley is a barrier that you must get past to get to the shop where you have an important appointment. You must have enough energy to overcome that barrier to get to your goal (the important appointment). Creating a new self or a new life requires that kind of energy to overcome who you were. This is what motivation is. It requires you to muster a why so strong that it will overcome any barrier. Goal setting is about finding the why of your goal. That why is critical to your success. Most people give up on their goals after only modest effort. Their stated goal is not important enough to give them the energy they need to overcome the usual barriers, let alone the extraordinary ones.

If you want to be able to run a 10K race and you are overweight and haven’t exercised in twenty years, the inertia you must overcome is massive. Just saying your goal isn’t enough. To be able to sustain the activity to accomplish that goal requires your why to be as strong as Harrold Crick’s.

Play around with this concept of finding a strong why for your activities. When you make your Todo list start writing down beside each item the reason you are doing that task. If you don’t need a lot of energy to start each task what kind of life are you creating?

To a new you!

Cliff

June 18, 2024

Your first response upon reading the title is, “That is absurd. I watch athletes on TV and maybe watch high school soccer on days I can go watch my son or daughter. But I’m not an athlete. I kind of was in the past but not now.” Most of us work at sedentary jobs where sitting is the norm. Therefore, we believe that our active life is over. Yes, we may jog or play golf. Maybe we play in some league once a week, but it doesn’t affect our weight or our wind. Our attitudes about exercise and athletics have been modified by our jobs. Jobs that are full of stress and empty of physical challenges.

Here is the truth. We are athletes by genetic heritage. Our ability to survive Ice Ages, famine, environmental disruptions is predicated on being athletes. We hunted by running the game to death. We moved at a jogging pace for hours, the original endurance athletes, until the game just died or collapsed from exhaustion. The functioning of our organs, our brain and our muscles depended on being athletes. Of course, we didn’t ‘work out’. Our lifestyle made sure we ‘were in shape’.

Today we don’t chase down our meals. So, our daily life does not give us the things we need to stay athletes. But our heritage dictates that we do our daily diligence or start to fade. Fade is a polite way of saying we become constricted in our daily life. We don’t like walking too much. Our knees hurt and our back hurts all the time. The remedy is we must become athletes on a daily basis. What does that mean, practically?

Athletes keep records. They have benchmarks for how they perform and goals to keep their brains engaged. For us, as athletes, we are in it for the long haul i.e. we are all endurance athletes. We train to live our best life until the end. Not for us the gradual decline into immobility or life in a wheelchair. You start with standard medical data such as blood pressure, kidney function and blood sugar tests. If these are ‘normal’ you start looking at Heart Rate Variability, resting heart rate, aerobic heart rate. Measures like this are detailed in Phil Maffetone’s books. Phil is well known as the trainer of great endurance athletes. But his real passion is to translate his methods for the ‘average’ athlete to use. His goal (and should be yours) is to be fit and healthy.

In the most minimalist fashion, if all you do is walk every day keep a spreadsheet. In it are the times and distance you walk and as you progress the maximum heart rate. Try to keep your heart rate in the aerobic zone. Progress for walking can be one of two things. 1) Your times for a fixed distance decrease and/or 2) You increase the distance. Your heart rate monitoring shouldn’t change.

As you become a more dedicated athlete your spreadsheets will expand. You will add extra exercises that enhance your goals. I have a spreadsheet with 52 exercises listed. I don’t do all of them every day. But each one has criteria and monitoring for that exercise. I also have overall goals such as ideal weight, waist size, bicep size and other goals that are measured on a monthly basis. If you don’t have goals, you will eventually stagnate.

What exercise do I recommend? I’m quite catholic in my tastes here. If you move and monitor critical benchmarks it doesn’t matter. Even Standing Practice done correctly will raise heart rates similar to aerobic exercise. What matters is that you view yourself as an athlete and train every day. The race you are running is your life. The goal is to be fit and active until the end. You are not training to compete against others for your ego. You are not ignoring pain in some misunderstanding about fitness and pain. You are training so you can live your best life.

For more information about Phil’s methods and one of his latest free books go to https://philmaffetone.com/ .

What if you are out of shape or never been is shape? What’s a good way to start? Most people who teach athletes start teaching assuming the person being taught knows a lot. If you are badly out of condition, injured or have never done anything you would benefit from Mark Wildman’s work. He has a program that uses little equipment and gets you on the path to fitness and health relatively quickly. You will learn how to be an athlete. I recommend him highly. Here is his link https://www.wildmanathletica.com/ .

Lastly, I can’t talk about training without emphasizing the need to exercise with correct posture. There are all kinds of methods to get your posture right. My favorite is the Egoscue Method as it is straightforward and easy to understand. And there are clinics all over the US. If you need some help with this reach out.

June 11, 2024

The most common tool we use to do the tasks we need to do is the Todo list. Most people use some version of this to handle all the tasks they think they need to do. It works if for no other reason as a reminder of what must be done. I want you to look at your Todo list in a different way today. Put down your pen or phone and look at your list. Read out loud the first 10 things on the list. How many of those items do you feel a sense of joy or excitement or anticipation for doing that task? If you are like most people, not one of those tasks excites you in any way! Yes, yes, I know, you have a job, and you have to do things to keep it. For those tasks is there some way to reframe the task to give you some tiny sense of joy or anticipation? Maybe you can try to learn something new to finish that task. Whatever creative effort you put forth can change your attitude and your satisfaction.

What about the tasks on your list that aren’t job related? Are they just daily things that you do to live? In your definition of living? As humans we aren’t created to work ourselves into a stupor then go home and drown our misery in television or recreational drugs. Humans can be incredibly boring or if you search for creating joy amazing creatures that create amazing things. If that Todo list is a joyless document your life is a joyless life-no matter how much you hide or deny it.

Tonight, when you sit down to create tomorrow’s list make sure you create two items that once done will bring joy into your life, no matter how small. If you do this regularly your mindset will change as your view of the world expands. It will start as a small change but in a relatively small time you will not recognize the mind that is creating the Todo list.

Believe in yourself.

To a creative, exciting life.

Cliff

June 4, 2024

Recently I started re-looking at the Maffetone Method. Philip Maffetone is/was an innovator in endurance sports. He pioneered the use of heart rate monitors. He stressed the importance of diet, especially good fats, in a healthy lifestyle. As far as exercise was concerned, he insisted that ‘less was more’. This meant that pushing the envelope every day was a self-defeating habit that led to injury and worse performance. I believe what he has done is very important. I was very impressed to find that his method for finding the aerobic formula was discovered using gait analysis which I believe shows all kinds of problems in posture and health.

My only big issue with his method is he doesn’t deal with the importance of posture in effort and injury. He hates stretching for warmups and only uses slow movement going up to the target heart rate. I think stretching can be a problem but not being posturally correct before running or cycling is worse. I use my postural exercise before running or vigorous exercise. It’s ok not to use pain as your gain barometer but ignoring posture is an issue. Every day I see an older gentleman running by my house, back bowed, hip flexors moving the legs and moving slowly. Every step as he runs that way is causing hip or knee damage. Yes, he is moving slowly enough that he isn’t hurting his heart but the stress he is creating is bad.

Of course, there are a legion of athletes who swear by him. Stu Mittleman and Mark Allen are two of his greatest success stories. The issue from my point of view is that he worked with these athletes one on one. He not only worked on their monitoring methods but their gait as well. Gait analysis and coaching can teach you to run with the correct posture, but it isn’t easy to learn by yourself. For the average athlete who may run a 5k every other month or so gait analysis is difficult to master without coaching.

The bottom line is that if you are an endurance athlete of any kind following Maffetone’s methods will make you a better athlete and make you healthier. I would add that doing the postural exercises I give (for free) on my website ( https://learnpainfree.com ) before you exercise or compete will enhance your performance and decrease your risk of injury.

If you aren’t familiar with Phil’s work here is his website. https://philmaffetone.com/

Stay healthy.

Cliff

May 21, 2024

Our exercise routines change depending on the time of day. If you exercise when you get up, you are trying to wash the melatonin out of your system and get as much energy into your body as possible. In the middle of the day can be a good time to do heavy, muscle building exercise. This can be a good time for that because in the afternoons our energy can drop a bit, especially if we’ve had a good lunch! Just before bed is a totally different thing.

At bedtime you try to wind down. You are wooing sleep by letting the melatonin into your system and relaxing your attention. This is why working on stressful problems just before sleep is so disruptive to good sleep. Or working on a screen or watching a lot of television before sleep. They all stimulate the brain rather than soothe it. Heavy duty exercise does the same thing. It wakes you up and can keep you stimulated for hours. If you want to exercise before bed, what should you do?

Here are the kinds of exercises I do before bed. I don’t do all of these every night but they give you a flavor of what I think works. As I am an internal martial artist, I tend to think of Qi Gong before bed. Slow movements with lots of controlled breathing, trying to feel the energy moving through the body. I might start with a 10 to 15 minute of Standing Practice, then do a few swings. Then I might do a few spinal stretches. I might do one of my favorite sets called Spinal Qi Gong which takes about 10 minutes and gently moves and expands the vertebrae in the spine. Sometimes I pick out a section of Tai Ji and practice it very slowly, paying attention to my breath and opening my joints. Often, I do a sitting exercise called Longevity Exercises which concentrate on various parts of the body and the breath.

I could go on for a long time, but I’ll stop because most likely you don’t know any of these exercises. What is clear though is what I concentrate on is slow expansion of the joints, deep slow breathing through the nose and a meditative concentration on what I am doing. You can do this with any exercise set you practice. Focus on slowing your movement without explosive, exhausting motion such as we see in aerobics. If you are used to doing kata (karate) you can do a form but do it very slowly with no power or snap in your motions. Concentrate on doing the motions slowly and with attention. If you do yoga do slow stretching with focus on your breath and muscles. Use your breath to lead your activity. Feel your body relaxing into yourself as you are ready for sleep.

You can do this, and you will have better sleep and dreams. If you need help you know where I am.

To a peaceful life,

Cliff