Similar Posts
Compassion, Autonomic Nervous Systems, HRV, Stress, Breathing and How to Win in Life
This week's video is very useful. It is about all those things on the title and more. The main goal is to give you a framework and some tools on how to analyze your own behaviors. Understanding compassion as a physiological state and how to better use your fitness trackers is half the point.
Fatigue is Hyperbolic and How to Pace
In some of the previous posts, I have talked a lot about the idea that a good workout should leave you energized rather than destroyed. Not always, sometimes we have to go to the limits to learn what those limits are. But in general, getting above your threshold more than producing physiological adaptation produces fatigue. And fatigue is really not that cool. The video today presents one of the many ways to look at and understand fatigue. This video is excellent for my endurance athletes out there. Watch it and let me know what you think!
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”.)
Slay your inner troll!
Trolls suck, and even though they are an Internet creation they are pretty much everywhere IRL too. Yes, they might be called douche bags, and they are not constrained by gender, race, or religion. The only thing that unifies them is that they are just a waste of time and energy. But my experience is that when it comes to fitness and nutrition, we all have an inner troll. And to be honest, this is the worst kind of troll there is.
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.
How hard to push?
This is a beefy video. I think it is fantastic. Rocky is in it, the world's strongest woman is in it, my cat Marta is in it. All the basics for awesomeness are covered. I receive the question of how hard to push often. The answer is not easy, and so it required some work. My objective is that you come out of it with a clear understanding of how to answer this question for yourself and your training.
