Shawn Phillips & Getting in Shape

I love commenting on my own blog post. ;)

Made me think of a little passage from a fun little book I wrote a couple months ago that I gotta post here:

1. Push Yourself. In the words of William James, the 19th century US philosopher and psychologist, “You have enormous untapped power you’ll probably never tap, because most people never run far enough on their first wind to ever find they have a second.”
   
   How bout we tap that power? The way to do it? Push yourself a little harder. Let’s take a quick look at the “Training Effect”—a concept used to build your body—and see how it applies to our lives.

The same principle that applies to building muscles in the gym applies to building excellence in our lives: In order to grow, we must consistently push ourselves just a little bit past our current comfort zone.

In exercise physiology parlance, this is called the Training Effect. The principles involved?

Overload: You must “overload” your body with more stress than it can currently handle. (Not too much as this may lead to injury, but enough so you’re out of your current comfort zone.)

Overcompensation: Your body is smart. It doesn’t like to get its butt kicked. So, what does it do? It overcompensates and repairs itself so that next time it’s stronger–and capable of withstanding the level of stress you put on it previously.

The training effect explains how muscles grow, how your heart is trained to beat more efficiently, and how your lungs are trained to distribute oxygen more efficiently. It’s also the same principle that dictates growth in other aspects of our lives: from our ability to give presentations at work to our ability to have challenging conversations with our significant other at home.

Go out and “train.” Push yourself a little further today…

C: Too cool, man. Too cool.

Ms.C: hehe

How bout another comment on my own comments?

So I just had one of the best workouts of my life thanks to Shawn & Ken’s inspiration. As I was HITTING it, I had this epiphany which I wrote about before:

1. Be Consistent. One of my favorite lessons from training my body (and helping others train theirs) is the idea that you want to focus on consistency over intensity. It’s not about getting all fired up one day and going off at the gym for an hour and a half…and then waking up the next day unable to move!
   

It’s much much much much much better to just show up. Put in your 20 minutes, your 30 minutes, your 40 minutes. Whatever. Just do it consistently.

Aristotle made it pretty clear: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence (aka Areté) then, is not an act, but a habit.”

This applies to all aspects of our life. Quite simply, we are what we consistently do.

Sure, it’s a lot more fun to jump into the latest fad diet or hit the gym for an intense workout once a week or go to a motivational seminar or yoga retreat, but the question is not how intensely we get into any given workout or week of dieting or weekend of yoga…it’s all about whether we have the self-mastery to do the things we know we should be doing consistently–moment to moment and week in and week out.

That’s awesome, man! We’ll have a push-up off right after the dance off. :)