Category: Simplifing

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Enough Exercise Ideas

Beer and Sprinting

How much is enough? And what are the priorities? Sometimes contrarian ideas produce great results.

Here’s a contrarian idea: Do as little as needed rather than as much as possible. Here’re two examples.

One of the best beers in the world is brewed by Belgian monks at the Westvleteren Brewery.

The list of what they don’t do is long: no advertising, no marketing, no labels, no brewery tours, you can’t buy more than two cases, there’s no delivery, and you have to pick up your cases there after placing your order by phone.

The list of what they do is short: they try to brew the best beer.

Their beer sells out and they could sell lots more; but as the abbot says “We brew beer to afford being monks.”

The second example is one of the best track coaches around, Barry Ross. In 2003, one of his athletes, Allyson Felix, became the first track star to go directly from high school into pro track. She also had the fastest 200 meter sprint that year.

The list of what this coach doesn’t do is long: no long hours in the weight room, no long hours on the track, no gizmos like sleds and parachutes, no squats, no training to failure, and no attempt to gain weight.

The list of what he does is short: a few heavy deadlifts, sprinting, and resting between sets.

In a nutshell, Barry Ross aims to make faster sprinters by building  stronger sprinters without adding extra body weight . He found the key exercises are running fast sprints and doing heavy deadlifts. To avoid gaining body weight the reps are kept low (2-5) with a timed 5 minute rest between just a few sets and his athletes never train to muscular failure. The number of sprints in his workouts never exceed 10. Ross thinks the biggest mistake coaches make is overtraining their athletes.

Barry Ross has pared down training to the essential and trainable. He’s arrived at a minimal workout with maximum results. Research shows athletes are better off lifting heavy weights for strength and then refining their sport’s skills by performing the actions of their sport.

Barry Ross’ athletes are runners who lift weights  rather than  weightlifters who run.

Establishing priorities and doing only enough instead of as much as you can, works.

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Happiness Heros Ideas Simplifing Sites Streamlining Unclutter

Teashop Takeaway Part II

Here’s the second part of my excerpts from the teashop video about “Life Management.” The primary speakers are Leo Babauta and Tim Ferriss.

You can check Friday’s post Teashop Takeaway (by scrolling below this post) for a longer introduction to them.

I’ve read many of their blogs over the years and a couple of their books as well. Neither of these guys was well know even three years ago. As they became successful writers, more people wanted slices of their pies. A pie really doesn’t get much bigger, you just have to cut thinner slices. So I’ve seen their ideas about life management evolve and morph with their circumstances. The foundations remained, but tweaks were made as they scraped the barnacles from the hull.

-Distractions – Simplify your life so you don’t have so many distractions. Try to eliminate as many distractions as you can. Then you need to become comfortable with letting small things go by the way. Let little bad things (say incurring a late fee) happen. Accept the small losses that allow you to focus on the one or two predetermined most important items.

-Time – There’ll always be more requests for your time than the time you have.

-Meetings – Avoid having meetings and conference calls. If you must have them, then set the agenda beforehand along with a start and end time and stick to it. Also, send out an email before the meeting to the participants sharing your goals and everyone can come in prepared.

-Slowness – Don’t fear slowness. Try building slow periods into your schedule. Really work to have dinners with three or more friends at least once a week. Doing this can help you appreciate things in real-time.

-Multiple Interests – Identity diversification is vital so you don’t become too attached to your work or any one thing. Find at least three things you can identify yourself with and try to set goals within each area.

-Deferring – Don’t defer things. Instead do or use things and appreciate them now. Cultivate an awareness of what’s important. By not deferring things, you’ll put yourself into the position of feeling that you’re living well.

-Gratitude – Try to express gratitude for what you think is good in your life. Once a week (or more) jot down three things in your life you’re grateful for. Appreciation is often a casualty of our modern quest for action.

-Introductions – When meeting someone new, try asking them, “What do you do when you aren’t working?” And see where the conversation goes.  It’ll be a more interesting start for you both than the common “What do you do?” This also touches on the identity diversification idea I was just talking about.

The ideas Leo and Tim share in the video cover lots of the broad categories they deal with in their writings. (Tim is actually trying to transition away from only being recognized as a life management writer, to become more associated with tweaking the human body’s performance).

If you want to get the gist of what Leo and Tim are about, you could watch the video and read my excerpts in under two hours saving yourself time and maybe money. I’m not saying to not read their stuff, I do and like it.

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Happiness Ideas People Sites Streamlining Time Savers

Teashop Takeaway

Recently, I watched a video of a panel disscussion that was shot in a San Francisco teashop. It was a public talk about “life management” featuring the shop owner and three guest speakers. Two of the guest speakers were Leo Babauta and Tim Ferriss and they provided the bulk of the interesting ideas.

Both of these guys have very popular blogs, generally addressing how to optimize your life, although each has a different presentation style. Looked at from a high school yearbook voting perspective, Leo would’ve been voted most likely to become a writer; and Tim would’ve been pigeonholed as most likely to succeed. You could imagine one is a tea drinker and the other a coffee drinker.

With success, they’ve risen in prominence and demands on their time have increased forcing them to more tightly focus on what works best to enable them to be productive while living non-harried lives.

Leo recently moved to San Francisco from Guam with his wife and six kids. Tim is a single San Franciscan and self-described as hyperactive in many endeavors with a penchant for traveling. They manage very different lives, plus each has to control their time eaters.

The video is an hour and a half long and most people won’t geek out for that long; so I’ll present what I think are some of their top takeaway ideas for making their lives better.

-Low Info Diet – To confront information overload, Tim deals with info on a “just in time” (only when info directly affects him) basis. This is in contrast to a  “just in case” style (taking in as much info as possible). Most situations covered by  high info consumption rarely arise. He says he “tries to get to the bottom of things, not stay on top of things.” If they miss something that’s important,  it’ll be brought to your attention as it bubbles to the surface in conversation.

– Keeping Up – The need to keep up with everything and everyone is self-created. If the expectation from other people is that you probably won’t get back to them generally they will not harass you unless it’s important.

-Single-tasking – You will have a saner and calmer life if you single-task. Do one thing end to end.

-Prioritizing – On getting things done, they both single-task, concentrating on getting the one, most important thing for that day done before doing anything else on their to-do-list. What is the most important thing to do? Probably the most uncomfortable one. Another test for importance is: if that one thing is the only thing you get done, you’ll feel your day’s still a success.

-Worrying – Worrying is not the same as preparing. The things most people worry about don’t usually even happen.

-Control – Everything is always changing, so try to give up trying to control things and be flexible instead.

-Slowness – Build-in or schedule slowness into your week and have those blocks of time become fixed, with other activities coming second. For example, Tim will not change a hike or dinner date if there are three or more friends getting together. These built-in times also act as a bracket, creating an ending point for the day.

-Big Shots – With success, Tim found he’s been welcomed into rarefied business circles,  there he’s been surprised how most of the hyper-successful individuals are relaxed and casual in most of their life dealings, able to concentrate on “the one most important” task in a day and accomplish it. These people weren’t the frazzled people you might imagine; being overwhelmed doesn’t fix anything, you need to have clear priorities.

-Routines – Develop routines, rituals, and routines to simplify your life. Routines will save your limited decision-making time since you won’t have those routine decisions to make.

-Habits – You’ll need to do something new at least five times before it will set in  as a habit, and stop just being an experiment. People generally respond to a better habit.

-Motivation – Rather than having to depend on discipline, motivation works as a better incentive. If you know your friend is waiting for you to go for a walk, you’re more likely to do it.

-Focus – Focus on your breathing to help you see what’s going on right now since your breathing is a constant and an easy thing to latch onto to bring yourself back to the present.

Lots of good stuff here I think. Too much for one post, so Tuesday I’ll post the second half.  If you like the ideas so far, give the video a look in case I missed some points that might mean more to you.


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Ideas Simplifing Trends

A Jockstrap and a Bowie Knife

A lot has been written in the last couple of years about simplifying your life. I try to live a simple life and pay as I go. I feel a kinship with the advocates of simplicity like Leonardo da Vinci who thought that “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”

Over the past year or so I’ve noticed a trend amongst the simplicty bloggers. Some people are trying to pare down to 100 items or less. Some of the writers have more realistically clarified their lists as  “Personal items,” a list of stuff only they own and use, like three pairs of shoes or 10 pairs of underwear and so on.

It seems to me that the more important “attitude towards stuff” is lost when the focus becomes reducing stuff to an arbitrary number of things. It can become a competition, a sort of race to the bottom. If you’re able to reduce your personal items to just a jockstrap and a bowie knife, and you don’t live alone in the remote bush, you’re likely using more items than you think.

Say you decide to forego owning a car and own a bike instead. Can a bike be counted as one item? I don’t know any cyclists, who along with their bicycle, don’t also have a few simple, minimalist tools for taking care of their bike. If you ride daily, you need a pump, oil, and a couple of tools. To paraphrase Mark Twain, everything is hitched to everything else.

It’s great to reduce the amount of stuff you have. However, why get rid of something you don’t strictly need if it increases your quality of life? If you like to play the guitar and do play it, don’t delete it. If you have a guitar and don’t play it get rid of it. Even with the mundane, I don’t need both a toothbrush and an electric toothbrush, but together my teeth are healthier and so my quality of life is increased.

It’s like tracking your spending to find where you spend money since most people don’t really know where their money goes. After tracking, you might find you’re spending $60 a month on cappuccinos. That’d be a great place to save money every month. But after thinking about it, you feel you get more than $60 worth of satisfaction from your daily ritual. You should keep doing it if you can afford it.

Paring down is good because there’s less to store, maintain, think about, and pay for. But if something brings more to your life than you have to incur to keep it, don’t nix it to reach an arbitrary number.

It’s ironic that I need 445 words to write about 100 things.

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Exercise Health Ideas Simplifing Sites tools

Useful Exercise

This is my first post about exercise. I’m only going to be presenting exercises I do and have found to be worthwhile.

But here’s the thing – the best exercise is, really, the one you like to do and that you’ll do (consistently). I’m starting out with an exercise that I think is useful and fun.

OK, there’re people exclusively doing  just this exercise and getting good results. I like it because it’s easy, quick, cheap, and leaves you prepared for real world activities like shoveling your driveway. All you really need is a sledgehammer. That’s right, a sledgehammer.

If you don’t have one, you can buy one easily enough. Better, borrow one from a neighbor who has lots of tools. A sledgehammer is a tool most people don’t use very often and so your neighbor probably won’t mind lending it to you to try this out.

Commonly, sledgehammers have heads ranging from eight to twelve pounds. Err on the light side. Eight or ten pounds is plenty. The ten pounder I use is pictured above. I painted bands on the handle so I could easily put my hands in the same position when switching sides.

Before I get to the particulars, I want to say I also like the way sledgehammers look and since they stand on their head with the handle up – they have a small footprint. So, in your office, spare bedroom, or garage it can be set in the corner when not in use; it looks cool and is easy to grab for a little workout. Of course it easily lives in a closet too.

The site shovelglove is the site I credit with putting me onto using a sledgehammer for exercise. Shovelglove’s Reinhard Engels says the genesis of using a sledgehammer workout began with this memory: “I remembered reading something in some French novel about coal shovelers having the best abdominal muscles of anyone the author had ever seen.”

His workouts consist of a 14 minute (timed) session Monday through Friday during which he uses his sledgehammer to mimic shoveling, paddling, hammering, and butter churning motions to name a few. You can make up your own motions. Do it on both right and left sides. And you’re done in less than 15 minutes which he sees as the shortest normally scheduled chunk of time. Checkout the shovelglove site to see videos.

You can listen to music, watch TV, wear whatever you like, and you’re done in a short time.

I use the sledgehammer this way too. But I enjoy other types of exercise (Engels doesn’t) so to be transparent, I want to say I use a sledgehammer workout to augment other exercises. For me, it’s part of a mix. But I think as a stand alone routine it’s great.

You might ask, what about actually beating on things with a sledgehammer, that’d be fun? You can and people do. Get an old tire and get medieval on it. But you’re going to need more room, have to do it outside and since it’s a faster motion you run a risk of injury.

And soon when the time arises that you need to shovel your driveway or drive a stake into the ground for the big top you’ll be ready.