Similar Posts
- Fitness | Recovery | Science | Smart Practices | Technology
Flo's Brain Grass Supplement
The fitness industry is a behemoth and it is growing with no signs of slowing down. Everyday there’s newer and crazier services that promise better results than everything that has been done before. Check out this underwater training. Or this new nutritional fad that can tell you exactly when to eat according to your circadian rhythm . Even classic old fads like the universal gym machine are coming back in its digital versions. For each macronutrient there is a corresponding diet, and a group of followers. For each type of movement a big believer and a naysayer. The internet does not seem big enough to hold all the new fitness out there.
Functional Fixedness
However, because we humans clearly cannot have nice things, the term has been bastardized, oversimplified, and not problematized enough. When Henrick laughs at my suggestion of doing curls, he is just repeating a learned behavior. It is common in the functional world to look at other forms of training and think they are poor, vain, or irrelevant. On the one side, this is how every culture is created, by creating an other to separate from. That’s how we define our existence as a thing. On the other hand, this attitude is the representation of a very bad case of functional fixedness (FF). Think of this as a bad habit of the mind, a way of thinking that hinders more than helps, and that in the case of Henrick will limit his performance and his movement capacity. The purpose of this post is to explain to you what FF is so that you can catch yourself in this trap, and do something about it.
Who is talking to you?
This happens to Hector all the time. He is in the middle of a training session and he encounters a place of challenge. If the struggle gets real, his mind starts going. At that point, he looks at me and he will explain he had a long week, or that he has never been good...
Plateaus are part of the process, Embrace the stuck!
Plateaus are often understood as problems. As stagnation, as if there is something wrong. Plateaus are a fundamental part of the process. Understand this, and you will be able to surpass them.
WHY IS THE ASSAULT BIKE SO HARD? – PART III
The short answer is this: because it is designed to do so. In this video we finish the series understanding the mechanics and physiology of the air bike.
My Two Main Principles in Fitness and Nutrition
The Strong Story Hypothesis states that the mechanism that enables us to tell, understand, and recombine stories is what separates us, humans, from primates. In other words that storytelling is what makes our thinking brainz special. The exciting thing is that Patrick Winston, its author, was an engineer and a professor at MIT, not an anthropologist or a social sciences guy. For many years he was the head of the Artificial Intelligence Lab. So when he says that storytelling gives us an evolutionary advantage over primates, that is meaningful. He gets to this conclusion by asking the right question. You see, the AI field was always trying to answer the question: can computers reason like humans? Winston made another question, more elegant, more interesting. What makes humans different than primates? Why are we capable of more?
Touché!
Nothing like a good question asked at the right time. In the video below, I present to you the principles that guide my practice in fitness and nutrition. I show them in the form of questions too. I believe this is the most effective way to approach such a complex problem. When you feel sluggish and unproductive today, instead of heading to Facebook, get this video a watch and let me know what you think.
