Things have come together swimmingly over the past few months. Here’s a look into what’s been occupying my time:
I was awarded the National Bureau of Asian Research Next Generation fellowship for 2010-11. I’ll be working alongside some absolutely brilliant people, assembling projects that concern foreign policy. I’ll also be pursuing independent scholarship for potential publication.
In December 2009, I graduated from the University of Washington’s Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies and earned my Master of Arts. I met some great people along the way, wrote a number of papers with the guidance of a superb set of mentors, and found myself as a writer and thinker. I couldn’t ask for more.
I’m now writing for WannaBeBig.com, a fitness and bodybuilding website. Daniel Clough is a fantastic guy to work with. I have free reign over what I cover and I couldn’t be happier. I’ll be using WannaBeBig as the platform for my fitness writing, hence the change in content here on the blog. You can read here my first article for WBB titled Elemental Fat Loss: Six Weeks to Grecian Proportions.- Note: photos have been included by the editorial staff that may be inappropriate for work. No nudity, but the article contains your typical fitness mag shirtless guy with abs/girl in a bikini shots.
Thanks to Nick Bromberg for hosting the JP Fitness Summit. I spoke on body transformation and had the chance to meet up again with one of my close friends, Alan Aragon. The other presenters–Lou Schuler, Nick Tumminello, and Bret Contreras–gave great talks. The JP Fitness Summit also brought out my colleagues in the fitness world; JC Deen, Roger Lawson II, and Michael Miller. Folks seemed to really enjoy the event, and I had a great time getting to know everyone in attendance.
I’ve been reading. A lot. Some of my favorite deep-thought provoking tomes right now include The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe, Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War by Robert Coram, The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama by David Remnick, and Proust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer.
A Chinese man looks at a note and flowers left as support outside the Google China headquarters in Beijing. Photograph: Ng Han Guan/AP
In response to increasingly strict demands over censorship, mounting government intervention, and a disastrous cyber-attack in December, Google has decided to pull its search engine functionality out of China. As of March 22nd, 2010, users in China proper are being rerouted away from the Google.cn website to offshore servers based in Hong Kong.
The mainstream media has, thus far, failed to pick up the implications of the decision to route mainland users to Hong Kong. This proves a metaphorical smack in the face to Chinese leadership as animosity between the former British colony and the Communist party runs deep. Hong Kong has long asserted a nominal independence from China since its reintegration in 1997.
Officially a special administrative region, Hong Kong continues to exist as a unique, semi-sovereign global actor. Its political, economic, and judicial systems oppose the “socialist” system of mainland China. When the constitution of Hong Kong came into effect in 1997, Chapter 1, Article 5 of this document titled “Hong Kong Basic Law” was written to state the following:
The socialist system and policies shall not be practiced in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, and the previous capitalist system and way of life shall remain unchanged for 50 years.
Whether Google was aware of the latent animosity between Hong Kong, whose population consists of 95% ethnic Chinese, and the Communist party remains unclear. Hong Kong features a regulatory economic system similar to the system employed in the U.S., functions in accordance with English common law, and looks to be on the precipice of universal suffrage, which should come into effect in the next decade or so.
All of this underscores the fact that Google has become a de facto player in global politics, whether it likes it or not. To the rest of the globe, Google reflects the position of the U.S. at large. The idea that a company can act in true independence from its host nation is still a foreign one to most states in the international system. The U.S. remains the outlier in global politics when looking at state-market relations, choosing to take a positivist, laisezze-faire approach to government regulation.
Calls from China demanding that the U.S. government seek action against Google were met with resistance from the White House. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton stated last week that Google’s actions were the exclusive concernof the Google and the Chinese state.
That hasn’t kept the Chinese from stirring the firmament of already strained U.S.-China relations. “The search engine leader’s exit from the Chinese mainland is a deliberate plot,” Ding Yifan, a researcher at the Development Research Center under China’s State Council, wrote in the China Daily. “Google’s case is in essence part of the U.S. Internet intrusive strategy worldwide under the excuse that it advocates a free Internet.”
So where does this leave Google in Asia? The company’s exit from China portends good things for Japan and Korea where Google has hereto struggled to acquire market share from domestic competitors. China’s Asian neighbors are more amendable to the presence of multinational behemoths akin to Google, and will likely welcome the foreign investment with open arms.
What makes an idea sticky? Why are urban legends a thought’s reach away while the arguably more important stuff escapes us so readily?
Take the worry over tampered Halloween candy as one example.
You hear about it every October in your local newscast’s feature on Halloween safety. In 1985, a poll taken by ABC found that 60 percent of parents in America worried their children would be victimized by tampered candy. The results prompted two sociologists to evaluate the veracity of this widespread fear and review every case in which a child was harmed during or immediately after Halloween. They began with criminal reports dating back to 1958.
The result of their study? Not a single case found of a child hurt by tampered candy.
Somewhere someone had generated a rumor built on an idea so evocative and sticky that for millions of Americans it became a reality.
The story of sticky ideas like this and others is brought to us by brothers Chip & Dan Heath in “Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die” (Random House; $26.00). Chip Heath is a Professor of Organizational Behavior and teaches at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. Dan Heath was most recently a Consultant to the Policy Programs of the Aspen Institute and has held research positions at the Harvard Business School.
“Made to Stick” extends the line of thought developed in Malcolm Gladwell’s seminal work “The Tipping Point.” Therein, Gladwell unearths the mystery of social epidemics and argues that ideas underpinning a social phenomenon need to be sticky before the phenomenon can tip and, for lack of a better term, go viral.
The Heath brothers claim that ideas are not born interesting but are instead made interesting. They cite the work of an Israeli research team that, in 1999, identified six advertising templates under which 89 percent of award-winning ads could be classified by an objective evaluation staff. The surprise here was that the most successful ads, the ones you or I would deem most creative and poignant, were in fact more predictable than the uncreative ones, and that creativity can to some degree be systemized and taught.
What the Israeli researchers did for ads “Made to Stick” does for ideas. According to the Heath brothers, sticky ideas share six common traits: a core that’s simple and establishes a strict priority for action, an element of surprise or unexpectedness, a concrete grounding that makes the abstract not so abstract, credibility in the sense that one example can cover limitless contingencies, elements of empathy that arouse emotion, and finally a story or narrative that ties it all together.
The authors’ mission is an ambitious one, and in fulfilling their aims they perform feats of academic alchemy, turning research studies into entertaining and applicable lessons on communication. This book alone has the power to change the way teachers teach, managers manage, and writers write.
The Heath brothers in their introduction identify a universal nemesis, the anti-matter of stickiness they dub the Curse of Knowledge. The Curse of Knowledge addresses the danger of knowing too much, specifically when experts spout jargon or discipline specific concepts to non-experts. This lies at the core of communication breakdown and strategic failure, the book argues, ensuring that the people who need the information most will be certain to never get it.
In response, what the book does is to establish common ground for the presentation of ideas by grounding them in the universal language provided in the six traits. Those in the highest levels of their profession fall in love with the abstract, and so when it’s time to convey ideas to the masses, experts have no clue how to make what’s infinitely interesting to them understandable and applicable to someone outside their field. Experts forget what it’s like to not know what they know.
This book is to communication and marketing what Strunk & White’s “The Elements of Style” is to the English language.
It is, however, not without caveat. The title is somewhat misleading. Yes, we learn how ideas stick, but the ambition of the introduction never finds actualization in the thick of the book. Where, in Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point,” the surprises and wonder never really stop, nothing in this book is all that, well, unexpected. The Heath brothers appear to want to stay close to harbor just in case bad weather crops up, and so never take any chances with their research.
Moreover, the somewhat schlocky and now quotidian practice of including some banal business acronym places an artificial limit on the language used in the book. The authors even go so far to rebuke this imposition in the text itself, stating in so few words they had to follow the party line and include an acronym for the sake of the publishers.
The chance that business leaders – the default reader of “Made to Stick” – will use the outlined concepts to enact changes in their corporate environment is quite the lofty goal, and perhaps one that should have taken a back seat to the students, academics, writers, politicians, and analysts who will no doubt have more ready applicability for these concepts. If anything, “Made to Stick” limits itself by aiming for the sky with an audience that may or may not care.
Had this book taken less of a business-intensive approach we would have seen the Heath brothers flex more of their literary muscle. As it is, the writing teeters on the mundane, the examples terse and to the point but lacking in nuance. Great for a plug-and-play business book, not so great for those seeking an in-depth exploration of the topics at hand.
Despite these reservations I can’t recommend this book enough. The book addresses the tried and true concepts of communication but presents them in a way that makes them easy to grasp and apply. A wonderful tome deserving of a place on your bookshelf, regardless of what your career aspirations may be. Best of luck in all your future sticky endeavors.
What is easy is rarely worth it, and what is worth it is never easy. I hear people my age complain about how someone else got a lucky break and is undeserving of their success or someone knew the right people or was born into prodigious circumstances and never had to work.
People underestimate the worth of failure. Experiencing failure – when what you take for granted and what you believe to always be there collapses upon itself – is what ultimately crafts our future. It hardens us and steadies us for the challenges that lie ahead.
The most successful athletes and performers never internalize their failure. They blame the refs or the venue – always an environmental factor – and never themselves. I think most of us would presume that they would blame themselves, thinking about how they needed to practice more or hadn’t studied their opponent well enough, but that’s not the case at all. I think many of us would also assume that this deference of blame is unhealthy egotism, but is it?
Not really. When it’s your job to perform at an elite level, where the difference between success and failure is so narrow and you’re expected to perform at that same level every single day, there is no time to question and no time to ponder. Put simply, neither elite level athletes nor the average person gain anything by dwelling on negative outcomes.
Shifting responsibility provides closure and the necessary clarity to focus on what’s important: the next step.
We will always encounter adversity. It’s how we handle that adversity that shapes our character. And what’s worth doing often incurs a great deal of risk that, while manageable, tends to arouse nervousness and anxiety and fear. It’s that anxiety and fear that tells us we are doing the right thing. I know some people who live by the motto “why try at anything that isn’t a guaranteed success?”
Because whatever that thing is will be a hollow substitute for truly living.
So often in life we have this tendency to make appeals to a person’s character or personality when explaining some deviant or undesirable behavior. Bad service at a restaurant? The waiter is lazy. Cut off while driving home from work? The driver is an asshole.
We so rarely take a step back from such situations to consider the broader environment or social context of these occurrences. We feed our psyches a false sense of security so as to make the world more palatable to our tastes. The world isn’t simple, and rarely are people decidedly evil or self-serving.
The theory of the fundamental attribution error, the conceptual bedrock of modern social psychology, argues that people over-estimate the importance of dispositional or personality-based explanations when explaining the behavior of others. We tend to under-value the importance of social or environmental context, the situational or institutional constraints that shape and mold another’s behavior.
Perhaps our waiter was still recovering from a late-night bender, working off a wicked hangover when he attended to our table. Maybe the driver that cut us off, a diabetic, was racing home to get in his next insulin dosing.
Malcolm Gladwell, author of the recently released book What the Dog Saw, offers a softer definition of the above. His version of the fundamental attribution error incorporates any situation where one extrapolates the importance of a measured characteristic to a generalized view of a person, attributing measured habituations to unmeasured or unrelated characteristics.
For example, just because a student is punctual and well-mannered gives no indication to his behavior at home. Again, it’s often our environment that shapes how we act. The fundamental attribution error is entirely other-focused, and so we never make these attributions of ourselves. In explaining our own behavior we will cite situational or environmental factors – we had a long day at work, we were hungry, an eyelash was caught beneath our contact lens – to explain errant behavior.
It’s the rare person who can, with objectivity, place his behavior beneath a psychological microscope and analyze his deeper character. This mindfulness pays dividends in our quality of life.
In a recent online debate I happen to participate in, these very same sorts of attributions were thrown around with abandon. This is often the case during heated argumentation when rational appeals take a backseat to emotional responses.
Next time, consider the institutional constraints of an individual before blanketing them with dispositional pejoratives. The subsequent lessons learned can lead us all closer to the truth.
When teetering between the prospect of decades of poverty or, conversely, servitude as a lifelong student (still not sure what the difference is), I had to make some hard choices before my life got out of hand and I turned forty, still waiting for my career to start.
But before I get to attend networking events and participate in team-building exercises as an M.B.A. student (there we go, now it makes sense), I get the opportunity (again) to flirt shamelessly with standardized testing and middle-school math.
I just dropped over one-hundred dollars on test prep material – that’s not counting the toner and paper costs from printing online study prep materials – and in the process abused twenty acres of endangered South American rain forest I’m sure.
I hope the koalas were safe.
Since this all began about a week ago, it’s been a trifle odd. I’ve found a certain intrinsic pleasure in the repetition offered by standardized multiple-choice exams, resembling, in a way, my coffee addiction. It gives me some sense of satisfaction knowing I’ve developed a palette for rote memorization and a substance that tastes like bitter charcoal.
What surprised me is that while I haven’t studied for an exam like this in years, the methods I used during graduate school to study share the same principles as the methods I’m using right now. I thought readers might be interested in how I go about relearning methods and information.
For your perusal, I present The Definitive Guide to Studying.
1. Plan your studying down to the daily and hourly level, blocking out time slots using fixed-time productivity.
I’ve found that the best way to ensure studying gets done is to schedule appointments with myself using Google Calendar and then block out those times. I put my phone on silent, log off all networked services except for a browser window, and lose myself in the crowd at a local student-friendly cafe or coffee house.
Based on pure numbers and material covered, haphazard studying never comes close to the efficiency of planned study. Identify specific targets for your study sessions (say, complete two large sets of practice problems in an hour, identifying mistakes and correcting them) so you don’t just waste time. Nail this and you’ll be well ahead of your classmates from the get go.
2. To better absorb material, introduce novelty by changing your environment.
In my experience, preparing for an exam tends to be an exercise in routine. If you’re utilizing the quiz and recall method you’ll no doubt be covering the same questions a number of times. To help offset the inevitable monotony, set yourself up for success by studying in a novel environment.
I prefer loud, echoey coffee houses that create a wash of white noise, the perfect background for any serious academic. Your particulars may be different, but I urge you to break the routine of studying in the same place you do your more mundane tasks, like Facebook, e-mail, or what have you. The change in environment will reinforce synaptic pathways and help you avoid classically conditioning yourself to performing in a particular environment, only to find yourself at unawares once put into a less-familiar setting.
3. Seek insight.
Your goal in studying shouldn’t be to just refresh your understanding of the material – it should be to master it. By aiming beyond what is necessary, you’ll gain something very special that few of your peers will likely ever achieve – insight.
This is what separates the 4.0 students from the the 3.8 students.
Having a comprehensive understanding of your coursework enables you to adapt and exhibit flexibility in otherwise highly stressful situations. Prepare for the inevitable test jitters by automating your responses.
By the time you sit down for the exam, while challenging, none of the content should be surprising. Like a concert pianist whose movements are automatic, your responses and answers should operate at the same level of fluency and proficiency. This means starting early with your review.
4. Quantify your improvement over the course of your studies through the regular, objective assessment of your progress.
Make regular check-ins with your studying to make sure you’re actually progressing and not just spinning your wheels. This means improving on provided practice exams or sample problems, or increasing your ability to illustrate concepts.
As mentioned earlier, I utilize the quiz and recall method, which is just what it sounds like. Generate questions on your own or solicit sample questions from your instructor. Research your notes and provide the most complete answer you can. Now, memorize the question and requisite answer as a set, no different than when studying vocabulary for a foreign language.
Conceptual questions can be tackled with this method as well. Develop a prompt that demands you elicit a comprehensive answer. An example from my field would be “what similarities do the political theories of classical realism and neoliberalism share with respect to the international system?” Generate an answer key for these sort of questions using your course notes, and again, memorize the question and answer as a set. Come test time, even if you can’t recall your passage in full, you’ll still prove more eloquent and well-read than those who haphazardly prep for such a prompt.
5. Eliminate negative internal dialogue and transform any of those self-limiting beliefs into a positive study experience through mindfulness.
I’ve found this to be the most critical factor in study success. Don’t, under any circumstances, walk into your study session believing you won’t succeed. Be mindful of your internal dialogue; this includes the inevitable pull you’ll feel to distract yourself from the task at hand. Be aware of any undue stress you take with you into your studying. When we’re stressed our brains can’t function and we’re unable create new memories. Bad news for test prep indeed.
Do everything you can to set yourself up for success. Wear your sweats, pop in your headphones (music without lyrics please), and rock out with some Foucault, Hobbes, or calculus derivatives.
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If this discussion piqued your interest, I encourage you to check out Cal Newport’s website titled Study Hacks. He and I share similar philosophies when it comes to studying, and his articles well worth the read.
I love books. A lot. I wish I could read all of them and still feed myself enough food to stay conscious.
But I can’t, and should I seek to remain coherent and mobile – I do – I often find myself struggling with the need to produce content, and in the same breath give attention to the word-filled tomes occupying valuable desk real estate.
See what I mean?
I have friends and know of others who, after the first page, will finish a text regardless of its quality.
I lack that sort of patience My time is too valuable to waste on poorly researched, poorly argued, or quite simply, poorly written books. You would be surprised how many there are out there.
So when Jamie Hale, uber-fitness coach extraordinaire, sent me his book Knowledge and Nonsense: The Science of Nutrition and Exercise to review for my blog, I knew I was in for quite the ride.
When I first opened Knowledge and Nonsense: The Science of Nutrition and Exercise, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Jamie and I met at the JP Fitness Summit last year, an annual event I’ve consequently been invited to speak at for its 2010 iteration. What struck me most upon meeting Jamie was his earnestness in speaking about his clients and coaching practice.
It’s a rarity in the fitness industry to find a guy like Jamie who cares more about education than he does marketing. I’m amazed he hasn’t yet devolved into jaded isolationism.
Knowledge and Nonsense is perhaps the most comprehensive treatment of diet and exercise I’ve ever laid eyes on. Jamie analyzes with great erudition nearly every diet program available on the market as of his book’s publishing date, 2007. That is a feat in-of-itself, and alone is worth the price of admission. Rather than waste time summarizing the book’s contents, which you can preview here, I’ll instead provide my thoughts and general observations.
First off, Jamie and I are friends, so I’m keenly aware of the time and effort Jamie put into this piece. He self-published the book and sells it independently through his website, thus the book carries Jamie’s heart and soul, untempered by the invisible hand of a publisher or a professional editor. It reads like a Jamie Hale brain dump (this is a good thing), every scintilla of his ken put down on paper for your consumption. The writing is terse but comprehensive and understandable even when particularly complex subjects come under discussion.
Where this book could be improved is in the area of practical application. I kept hoping for a conclusion that synthesized the core elements of Jamie’s approach into something I could take into the kitchen or gym and make use of. We’re swept into the throes of science, and without ample background in the field, beginners may feel overwhelmed. It’s unfortunate as the content teems with vivacity and exuberance, and is no doubt of benefit to readers of all inclinations, but the presentation keeps it from being as accessible as it could be.
Knowledge and Nonsense is a tour de force of the fitness industry as we know it today. You will find yourself well-armed in debate proving you’ve done your homework and covered this material with ample providence. This work holds special purpose for the fitness practitioner, who should be aware of their competition and understand the theory and research supporting their methods. Nothing is worse for a client than finding their trainer or coach unable to articulate the science underpinning a given exercise or diet prescription.
So don’t be caught off guard and let Johnny sweep the leg. You can arm yourself for potential internet forum combat by purchasing Jamie’s book here, direct from his website.
The catalyst for e-books - Apple iPad (Source: Wired.com)
Apple’s at it again. After much speculation and the usual hype leading up to an Apple product launch, the iPad is finally here.
Unlike the immediate universal acclaim received by its predecessors the iPhone and iPod Touch, Apple’s first foray into the realm of e-readers and tablets has merited quite the ambivalent response.
A number of people have asked me my thoughts on the iPad and what it may portend for the future of tech devices. In this post I weigh in on this curious, over-sized iPod and speculate who may be buying this sleek device that’s been gifted with a rather unfortunate name.
First, this thing is dead sexy. It gets my latent geek juices flowing. Hand it to Apple, they understand aesthetics and how important they are in purchasing decisions. They single-handedly emboldened an entire indie-hipster sub-genre best dubbed ‘geek chic.’ You can find these individuals at your local independent coffee house shotgunning espressos between penning brilliance in their Moleskine notebook and executing rapid-fire hotkey shortcuts on their MacBook.
My gut instinct on Apple’s latest endeavor is that, like its incipient moves into producing digital media players (iPod) and phones (iPhone), they’re going to open up the floor to other companies by showing them that, yes, you too can make money off these sorts of products. Numerous MP3 players and other devices preceded the iPod, but Apple cultivated attention by making the device attractive and integrating it with iTunes. And with the iPhone, Apple won the popularity contest by taking productivity apps out of the realm of Blackberries and putting them into the hands of casual users.
Now is this thing perfect? Far from it. The e-Book crowd won’t likely make the switch given the high price point ($499) and use of LCD rather than e-Ink technology. No one will be discarding their laptops any time soon, and certainly not their iPhones.
So who the heck is this thing for?
My guess: old people, the non-tech savvy, and interestingly enough, college students.
This would explain the rather tepid response of the tech world. It simply doesn’t appeal to them because it just adds another rather useless product category that serves only to duplicate the functions of a phone or notebook computer. However, for someone unfamiliar with these devices, it’s far easier to pick up a tablet and just point to where you’d like to go than haggle with a system boot or having the wherewithal to acclimatize to a device like the iPhone.
Steve Jobs confirmed my hunch when, during the press launch, he alluded to how easy it would be to “pick up the iPad in the kitchen,” access the web and order movie tickets. Sorry, but I try to spend as little time in the kitchen as possible, much to the chagrin of my girlfriend, the graduate student. Speaking of which…
The benefit for college students is a little different. Students and scholars alike work almost exclusively from the PDF format. Readings are uploaded to library electronic reserves and nearly every peer-reviewed journal available is downloadable via PDF. Both my girlfriend and I put all the available eReaders on the market through a rigorous PDF trial and they all failed.
Miserably. To date, our only option has been to overheat our laser printer and get our readings bound by angry FedEx Kinko’s employees.
My hunch is that the iPad will fill this PDF gap given its ability to act as a surrogate laptop and a pseudo e-Reader through Apple’s new service, iBooks. If someone can capitalize on this market and ease the back pain of college students and in the process unload books, course packs, and hastily stapled printouts from messenger bags, they will make a killing.
So there you have it. The Apple iPad. For certain user groups it seems to have real appeal, but for others who work remotely from their laptops, it may just be redundant.
Then again, if they had called it the iSlate, I may have pre-ordered one based solely on the name. Oh well.
Six years ago my only sartorial option was a forty-two slash forty-four stretch-pant husky pair of jeans. I was nineteen at the time, and if you couldn’t guess, this blog lead is code for, “I was really fat.” Within six months of my nineteenth birthday I dropped over one-third of my body weight through obsessive cardio and strict adherence to FDA dietary guidelines. Yes, the food pyramid does work if used correctly. I’m not saying it’s going to get you into cover model shape, hardly, but it will allow you to lose weight. So much for all the ado over carbohydrates and insulin blunting fat loss.
At the end of my cardio thrashing I tipped my home Tanita scale at 119 pounds at a height of 5’7”. So yeah, maybe I overdid it a little, but I had a 27” waist, and suddenly girls had taken an interest in me. This made me happy.
Since then, I’ve spent much of my free, non-academic time obsessively pursuing an education in the human body, learning how to defy our sometimes terrible genetics. These days I rarely let myself go above 13-14% body fat. In the process, I’ve learned from some of the best, including my direct mentor Alan Aragon, alongside Lyle McDonald, and Jamie Hale, and cohort fellows Martin Berkan, JC Deen, Skyler Tanner, and Roger Lawson. Lou Schuler has been a huge influence in my publishing career. I’d be remiss to not mention him.
So, in no particular order, here are some musings on what I’ve learned in the past half-decade concerning body transformation.
1. To succeed, you have to change your (eating) habits for life.
I put eating in parentheses since this is the sticking point that most often derails diet and fitness resolutions. With studies like this coming out showing that exercise takes a backseat to proper nutrition, this is hardly surprising. For most people these habits amount to more protein, more vegetables and fruit, and less junk and sugar and processed foods. This is important, perhaps the most important thing folks need to learn about getting and staying lean. If you adopt a whole slew of habits that you realistically can’t maintain for the rest of your life, you will fail. Hence the issue with low-carb diets, paleo diets, low-fat diets, and on and on.
I keep my habits basic. Ensure I get enough protein each day, at least 1.0g/lb of total bodyweight. I eat a minimum two servings of non-starchy vegetables a day. I take six total grams of fish oil, and hit at least three heavy resistance training sessions per week. I get servings from the major six food groups – lean protein, dairy, fats, starchy carbohydrates, non-starchy carbohydrates, and fruit – in mostly unprocessed form. 20% of my calories come from junk, whether it be Chinese takeout, pizza, or cookies.
This stays the same regardless of my goals. The only things that change are the amounts. And that’s it. Stuff I can stick to no matter how crazy and hectic my life gets.
2. To change your body you have to change your mind.
So this is the big catch twenty-two I’ve discovered with successful clients and other successful body transformers. To get where you want to be you have to put your mind in that place. At a basic level, our brain controls everything we do. Your brain determines whether you binge on that sleeve of bagels. Your brain chooses to workout or stay home. Your brain chooses whether you put on pants in the morning and drive to your job.
Those who have the hardest time with transforming their bodies, unsurprisingly, have the hardest time transforming their minds. Belief is a powerful thing. If you can’t re-frame your mindset to re-frame your behavior to emulate that of those who have been successful, well, no amount of reading or wishing is going to get you there. Like I tell my clients, if you want to look like a cover model you have to have the mindset of a cover model. Does this mean you do everything they do, to a fault? Of course not. But true mental, emotional, and spiritual commitment to a goal will do more for your health and physique than any supplement, any training, or any diet plan.
3. Moderation, temperance, and rest should not be underestimated in the physique equation.
Yes, everyone wants to be ten pounds lighter as of yesterday. Or increase their arm girth by two inches in two weeks. I notice this low-level paranoia and obsession most on fitness forums, which can at times devolve into the blind leading the blind. Not always, but sometimes. If someone tells you to do three sessions of high-intensity interval training a week, ask them how much they squat or deadlift. You’ll probably hear something about bad knees or something. Put simply, intensive resistance training demands rest.
One of the hot things circulating around the interwebs these days is this notion of auto-regulation. In non-labcoat speak, this boils down to modifying whatever program you’re doing based on your performance during that session.
Example. If I’m scheduled to do 5×5, I’ll make it a point to use more weight than the previous session. I’ll slowly increase the weight until I can’t complete a rep with good form. Let’s say by my third set I’m spent, having performed three PR sets. There’s absolutely no logic to me taking the same weight and grinding out two poor sets, only to accumulate fatigue. My time would be better spent moving on to an accessory movement or performing a higher rep, lower weight set of the same movement.
The same thing can happen with a diet. If I can’t think, can’t move, weight loss has stalled, and body temperature is down, a refeed, at the bare minimum, or a perhaps a full diet break is probably in order.
4. Find a goal and stick to it.
Seriously, what the hell is it with so many people wanting to lose weight and train for marathons at the same time? Could your goals be any more mutually exclusive? To train for a marathon you have to focus and improve upon performance. What’s the first thing that suffers under fat loss conditions? Performance. Presents quite the conundrum, doesn’t it?
This is why I urge athletes who want to lose fat to do it during the off-season, when performance can take a hit and pose no serious issue. The vain bros out there love to talk about losing fat and gaining muscle. What they fail to understand is how quickly (or, to be more appropriate, slowly) they can expect this body tissue transference to occur. It’s much slower than one would initially presume. In these cases, I urge trainees to select a primary goal, and accept either quicker muscle gain with minimal or no fat loss, or the converse, quicker fat loss while maintaining or slightly increasing lean body mass.
Lest we forget, maintenance, or what I term the “cruise” phase, is often my favorite goal of all. In a nut shell, you chill out, drop protein, eat a bunch of carbs, scale back training and just relax. I normally give myself December off, doing three instead of four workouts a week, and adding in some ample fun foods that I normally restrict to special occasions. By the time January rolls around, I’m tearing it up in the gym setting PRs all over the place.
5. Develop a social support network.
Individuals, when they jump on diets, tend to have a ‘go it alone’ attitude. They become social pariahs, living off whatever few food choices their particular nutrition plan offers them, and then the world becomes a dismal hell where everyone else stays skinny and eats nachos and pizza. Well, it doesn’t have to be that way, first off, since any diet that is that restrictive is probably not worth doing. Secondly, you have to find like-minded folks to help you along the way. Enter the interwebs.
Hop on to any fitness forum and you’ll find, sans Misc or Off-Topic, the most popular board to be the Training Log board. Start a log and you’re sure to attract a following. I’ve witnessed entire bodybuilding contest preps, rapid fat loss programs, and a host of other spectacular transformations from the warm confines of my bath robe. Take advantage of the inter-connected world we live in and leverage it find success in your physique aspirations.
So, what have you learned in your fitness endeavors? What tips can you share with other readers? Post your thoughts in the comments section below.
If my gym is any indication, New Year’s resolutions are in full effect. I haven’t seen so many cardio machines occupied on a Sunday evening in quite some time. Actually, in about a year to be more exact about it. Even the weight room was pulsating with epic levels of brotitude. I should have snapped some photos.
And yet, I still see so many folks avoiding the very exercises they need most, continuing to seek the easy way out. Everyone wants to know, what’s the secret to fat loss? How do I get abs? How do I get rid of all that excess leg fat?
Here’s your magic equation: T (Time) + IEE (Inspired & Educated Effort)= R (Results)
It works every time.
I can’t help you with the time, you have to figure that out on your own. If something matters enough, you’ll make time.
I can help, to a certain extent, with the inspiration. I am a bonafied former fatty, and not just the kinda-sorta overweight kind. No, I fell into the “obese” category for the majority of my adolescent and teenage years, and while my story may be inspiring, I can’t physically give you my inspiration.
What I can offer you here is education. To get you started, I’ll give you three easy steps you can take right now to make whatever program you’re following that much more effective.
1. Eat more protein
This alone could stave off culinary hedonists from rampant overeating. Protein is satiating, it’s thermogenic (meaning it encourages fat burning in the body), and it’s the big dietary component of muscle creation or muscle retention. Without it, you’ll turn out to be a smaller, weaker version of your current self. If you’re on a fat loss program, aim for around 1.25g/lb of total body weight in protein per day.
2. Define your goals
Trying to prep for a marathon and focus on fat loss is, frankly, dumb. They are two contradictory goals, and while not mutually exclusive, one does not necessarily follow from the other. Lose the fat first, then focus on the marathon. The same goes for guys who want to gain muscle and lose fat at the same time. It’s an entirely possible but long and slow road, necessitating at least short-term improvements in one or the other.
3. If you’re a woman, start resistance training
I have no idea what the current tenor of the Internet is with regard to women and bulkiness in relation to sexiness, but my stance is firm. If you’re female and you want to be curvy, toned, or sexy, you have to do some form of resistance training. Now does this mean you need to do the same training as a figure competitor if you want to look like Jessica Alba? No. But it does mean getting accustomed to handling your bodyweight, being able to perform push-ups, lunges, and the like.
So there you go. Three easy pieces of fat loss friendly fun. Get to it.
