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- Close the Gap | Coaching | Finding What Works for You | Fitness | How to be a learner? | Mindset | Smart Practices
Banzo's sword and metric fixations
Are you a victim of your metrics? Are you constantly trying to better your metrics, just to feel frustrated and unaccomplished? I have been there, it is awful. In this post I present to you a set of principles that will help you use metrics to serve you and not the other way around.
Training Hard
We all love to train hard. We love the feeling of working our asses off, yet I think training hard, truly training hard, is greatly misunderstood. Hours of media featuring Energy Drinks, Athletic Shoes, and awesome-sports-movies-action-montages has lead us to confuse training hard with intensity. We have this image in our head that training hard is finishing a workout sweaty and gassed, lying on the floor looking up at the ceiling like somebody just punched us in the face and stole all our money while quoting Jame Joyce. That outcome turns out to be fairly easily achieved: just do 50 burpees as fast as you can without stopping... it will take you less than 5 minutes and if you really commit to not stopping you will finish on the ground regretting life.
Just Chill, Commit to Mastery
No matter what skill you choose, you can visualize mastery. You can see it. Now imagine what it would take to get there... I bet that in your visualization that mastery does not happen in 6 months. In my mind’s eye I can see myself creating awful noises for quite some time before actually playing a tune. I imagine that if your thing was to master German, in your vision you can see yourself stumbling through words before you can actually write amazingly good emails. By the same token, I bet that if you imagine your teachers for that journey, you don’t see slicky guys selling you fast results or trying to trap you with hard sells and gimicky marketing. In that vision, mastery is a continuous, long, and difficult process of learning. It’s slow and tedious. This is why it’s so rare. (In other words, mastery is what Hollywood movies show in a super fast montage with the subscript “five years later”.)
Fitness and Money
Last week I had a fantastic opportunity. I was invited to talk to a bunch of 8th graders about fitness and lifestyle habits. It is COVID times so I did not get to speak to them directly as I would have preferred, but I still loved every minute of it. I always thought they taught us a lot of good stuff in school, but very little of the most basic: money, fitness, nutrition, emotional intelligence, and interpersonal relationships. The fact I had the chance to change that for a bunch of kids, even if in a tiny way, felt great!
Two great things came out of that talk. One of them is the post today. I usually feel ambivalent about my writings. I feel confident about this one. So much in fact that if you don't like it a lot and get something out of it, I will buy you a six-pack of your drink of choice. I am that bold!
The second thing is I got a new nickname. The 8th graders call me Dr. Muscles. I worked hard for my Ph.D. I worked hard for my muscles. I liked Obi Juan, but this one is not magic. I e
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.
What the F#@%$ck is Recovery?
So is napping recovery? Is stretching better than rolling? What do you mean I should not be sore. No pain, no gain, dude! Of course I want to sleep better and longer, but then at what time do I work out if I am effing sleeping 8 hours? Should I ice or not? Should I run on my recovery days or should I do yoga? Why is Francine talking to me about floating chambers, and why is Henrick massaging himself weirdly with that percussion drill.
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Recovery is a weird topic, full of crazy things, and a lot of sci-fi marketing. In other words, what the fuck is recovery?
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Watch the video to know more about it!
