Tag Archives: General

Aug 05 2020
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Exercise, General health, Life, Training, VDOT O2

A Truth About Coaching and Personal Training

Where most people really need to work on themselves is in:

  • The Kitchen. The oft cited, never sourced adage is that 80% of your body comp depends on your diet, and abs are made in the kitchen. Debate the stats all you want but this is the truth. You can’t outwork a sub-optimal diet.
  • The Bedroom. (I don’t mean hanky panky either.) People need to get better sleep. Even well-trained athletes struggle to get consistent, high quality sleep. A lack of high quality sleep produces a snowball effect of stress, hormonal deprivation, and general fatigue that follows you wherever you go.
  • Their own minds. We all have our motivations, insecurities, anxieties, that drive us or hold us back. For many people, whatever they think they’re going to find in the gym or in therapy/medication is something they need to reconcile within themselves. It can be a general insecurity, something bad from the past, etc.

This is a fundamental issue I discovered with the use of personal training, even as I was studying to become a CPT. For the vast majority of people I could end up working with, I could only address the at-best ancillary concern of developing a workout program. I could not address let alone solve the underlying problems behind why they felt they needed it. And I cannot reconcile the salesman’s mindset to take their money because those underlying problems ultimately don’t matter as much as the need to train.

This is not totally the industry’s fault by any means. Trainers are just trying to earn a living. You paying for personal training pays their bills. Don’t take this as a fundamental indictment of personal trainers. Hell, all trainers are battling the exact same challenges I just listed. These needs and challenges are just as true for CPTs.

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Nov 25 2018
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Food, General health, Life

Overeating: What To Do When You Do It

You’re trying to lose weight or maintain your current weight, trying to stick to a calorie total… but then you go wild and over-eat. Literally all of us have done this countless times. And it doesn’t have to trigger a disastrous slide into terrible long-term eating, or to a lesser extent another eating binge.

Here’s some tips for what to do in the moment after you’ve done it, and what to do the next day to mitigate what you did.

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Nov 08 2018
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Life

No one is fundamentally better or worse than anyone else

Stripping away any context, no one is fundamentally better than anyone else. It’s one thing for people to have greater ability or performance, but another to think that one human is inherently better or worse than another no matter what.

I think this is a common gap between my world view and mot other people. Most people do hold a sincere personal belief that some people are fundamentally better than other people… whether because of their career or upbringing or ethnic background or who they vote for or what media they consume or what.

Some of this is rooted in religious belief (which fundamentally teaches that some people are inherently blessed and some inherently cursed). But the belief of some being fundamentally better than others is largely a fundamental human flaw. None of us are equal, but we all are human, and we all are capable of improvement. What we become may be somewhat influenced by our background and environment, but it’s largely based on our actions.

Thus you are also not fundamentally worse than anyone else. You are capable of improving if you want to. There are always limits to what exactly you can do and how, but regardless of your past you are capable right now of doing better and being better.

I generally avoid people who think some people are fundamentally better or worse than others. For anyone I cannot avoid, I proceed with caution. As long as someone has this limiting belief, it does compromise how much I can trust their judgment.

By most people’s definitions, I:

– Should not have survived infancy
– Should not have graduated high school
– Should not have gone to college
– Should not be intelligent
– Should not have ever been able to perform or dance on stage in any capacity
– Should have never become an endurance runner
– Should be diseased and probably dead

And it doesn’t matter at all what I have done or can demonstrably do.

But I’ve clearly defied all of the above, because I like everyone else am the product of my actions. And so are you.

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Nov 02 2018
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General health

Do you really need a doctor?

I want to talk a bit about seeing the doctor.

Many Americans go to the doctor just about any time they get sick, even when the illness can only heal on its own (like a cold). And then we wonder why healthcare has gotten so expensive.

The overlooked prime contributor to health problems is people’s own lifestyle habits. A diet heavy in processed food, light on natural whole food, a lifestyle devoid of physical activity and sufficient sleep, and the resulting penchant for quick, rampant obesity are all easy contributors to nearly all of America’s most common health problems, from chronic colds to heart attacks to even cancer.

You are what you eat and what you do. Your body is the scoreboard for the health of your lifestyle. It usually won’t lie.

A doctor will rarely do more than blithely address a patient’s need to improve their lifestyle, and to their credit there isn’t much more they can do than that: Most of a patient’s contributions to their own bad health are a product of bad habits that a doctor can’t really do anything to address.

A doctor can’t stand over you 24/7 and rouse you from the chair to exercise or slap the processed food out of your hand. They know you need to fix your diet and can tell you so when you visit them, but that’s about as far as they can go.

So that leaves the person in the mirror. To be honest, most people lack a sense of accountability. This is why so many people go to the doctor far too often for just about every ailment, regardless of how much can be done about it.

You can avoid going to the doctor most times, and if you’re reading this chances are you have already taken far more steps to address your health than the average person. You have the ability to take your own countermeasures, in many cases more effective than anything you could pay a doctor to prescribe you.

A good metaphor for this approach: Let’s say you accidentally knock a small hole in the drywall of your apartment. Whoops!

You can either call the maintenance guy to come fix it, possibly costing yourself $50-100 for the repair and labor, possibly costing yourself part of your security deposit, or even a higher rent the next time you renew your lease.

Or you can buy a wall repair kit at a store like Home Depot for $10-15, find and buy a small can of some matching paint for even less, and quickly patch it up yourself.

And you can do the same thing with your health, because many of your health problems can be addressed by paying attention to how you handle your diet, your sleep, your exercise and your emotions.

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Oct 24 2018
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Uncategorized

Batch and Portal: An effective time-saving way to address questions in the workplace

I’m gonna head a bit off topic from running to address communication in a workplace.

We underestimate the importance of flow at work, as well as the negative effect of interruptions. Many jobs are built around the response to interruptions (e.g. retail, call center work, law enforcement, etc). But in many white collar jobs they usually aren’t necessary and most can be avoided.

Let’s never mind larger fundamental topics like open floor plans, open door policies, and other debatable topics. I want to toss out a better method of asking for assistance on non-time-sensitive requests or questions that anyone is welcome to use.

Again, I preface this by pointing out this is for non-emergency, non-time-sensitive items. Obviously, if the building is on fire, if someone needs an answer right this moment, if helping a customer, guest or VIP who needs help now depends on an answer to this request… interrupt whoever you need to as soon as possible.

For every other question or request, when it comes to dealing with someone you need to speak with a lot for these items… do what I call Batch and Portal.

Batch: Instead of interrupting every time you have a question or request, write each one down, and then bring them to the person every so often, whether that’s once an hour, once every few hours, twice a day, etc. By interrupting the person once with a set of requests, it saves them time, allows them to better focus, and does the same for you as well.

Portal: There are probably certain times of the day that are better than others to approach this person. We’re typically talking about a supervisor or a specialist with these instances, and they’ve got a lot of meetings, projects and other items on their plate.

Presuming you have access to their schedule or generally know their schedule, you can figure out which times of day are best to approach this person, when you know they will have time to address your needs. It sucks to batch questions, and then find out once you go to them that they’re in a meeting or otherwise don’t have time right now. Planning ahead allows you to get the info you need when you go to get it.

If in doubt, you can also directly inquire. Call/email/DM/etc and ask for a good time to come to them with questions etc. This allows both of you to plan ahead. And, of course, perhaps there’s a chance they’re free and can help you right away… but if not then that gives you both a chance to plan ahead.

If you have doubts, rebuttals, caveats about Batch and Portal… no need to fire back and share those. If this idea doesn’t work for you, you’re free not to use it.

But it’s worked well for me, for others who have applied it, and can work for you as well.

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