Power = Force * Distance / Time

One of the best qualities we can develop is the capacity to recover quickly from difficulty or misfortune. That quality is known as resilience. Physically we want to be tough and strong and fit so that adversity has as little effect as possible.  Like bugs on a windshield we would prefer to be unphased by the problems life throws our way.  However, we must recognize that life will throw bigger and worse things at us. Part of our constitution is concerned with how much something will set us back.  The other part of our constitution is concerned with how quickly we can rebound.  These two qualities are intertwined.  In CrossFit we think of this as something that goes hand in hand with our Fitness. 

Fitness is defined as your work capacity across broad time and modal domains. Fitness can be considered a state of super wellness. Your fitness creates a hedge against sickness.  If your fitness markers like your mile time, your deadlift, and your max set of pull-ups are near fit values that’s good and it should help drive your health markers like blood pressure, body fat percentage, and resting heart rate toward super normal values as well.

As I write this we are in the midst of a worldwide pandemic. Fit people are not immune from Covid 19. We are hearing about people dying from every demographic. Fitness is not a “get out of jail free” card, but it is the best insurance we have that we can come through this relatively unscathed.

Ideally we would like our body to respond like the virus is a bug on our windshield. However, if it does hit us harder we want our bodies to have the resiliency to fight it and bounce back quickly. When it comes to working on our fitness, it is just like the proverb. “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”

So start taking care of yourself right now. Eat healthy. Exercise. Sleep. Meditate. Smile. Love.

It’s Saturday and I, like most everyone, have been avoiding human contact for the last week or so. Some parts of the world have been locked down for weeks already and some are just joining party. But it is clear now that this is the way of things for the foreseeable future.

One thing that is clear is that maintaining both consistency and constancy in these times is paramount to our physical and mental health. Consistency is steadfast adherence to the same principles, course, form, etc. My jiujitsu school, Sheridan BJJ, has “be consistent” as one of its core values. If you wish to improve in something, you need to practice consistently. Showing up day after day, rain or shine, is the key to long-term results. So what happens when we cannot train the way we did before or go to the dojo or the gym? How do we be consistent in the face of such adversity? That’s the eternal question.

Life has a way of screwing with us. We plan to go to the gym every day. We plan to go to jiujitsu every day. We plan to eat right. We make plans and then God laughs at us and life throws us a curve ball. In many ways, being forced to take time off is a blessing because now we can finally make time to take care of ourselves and do some of the things we’ve neglected. The cruel twist is that now that we have the time to train and eat right, the gyms are closed. The trick is that even though you cannot necessarily practice jiujitsu or lift the heavy weights are whatever is your normal practice you can still maintain the habit. Or if you have been trying to build the habit, now is the time.

A healthy routine is more important now, than ever. Even though you have nowhere to go, set your alarm every day and wake up and implement your morning routine. Be consistent in your daily practice. You have the ability to do some things that you may have been neglecting. Try to build those habits now while you can. Maybe you need consistency in your nutrition, or your workouts, or your stretching, or your meditation. You know you have been using the excuse, “I wish I could, but I just don’t have the time” too long. Get started. Do a little everyday and get the ball rolling. Momentum will build and you will start to see the fruits of your actions.

The other quality we must embrace is Constancy. Constancy is the quality of being faithful and dependable or enduring and unchanging. While we have the ability to create consistent habits that allow us to grow and ground us. We also must practice constancy and be faithful and dependable for those around us. We are charged now with trying to be our best and most optimistic selves for those that depend on us. We, all of us, need to do what we can to help stop the spread of the virus and to help our families and communities weather the extreme hardship that this pandemic is thrusting upon us. Panic is not justified, nor is indifference. Adherence to our core values and our moral code is what will allow us to get through this without losing our humanity. While we are physically isolated it is easy to become selfish, but that is the most insidious trap. We need to think communally even when alone. We need to fortify ourselves and our families so we can be our best for the greater communities that need us.

Stay safe and stay healthy.

Everybody on the planet is trying to sell you the best thing.  The optimal thing.  The perfect thing.  The problem with the perfect workout or the perfect diet is that they often require much more time and effort and the likelihood of you failing at a perfect plan is far greater.  If you want to be a championship athlete, you might need to spend 3 or more hours a day in the gym, but right now, you can’t seem to get 3 hours a month of time in the gym.  Similarly someone can write out the perfect diet plan for you, but if you are chasing it down with 3 sodas or 3 beers a day it’s not gonna work.  The allure of the best program makes us want to buy it because it promises the best results.  As consumers we can’t help ourselves.  However, as General Patton observed, “a good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.” 
I am selling you a good plan which you can violently execute now as opposed to some perfect plan that you can execute next week.  I’ve read several books on building habits and one thing that they agree on is that you should start with small, easily achievable steps.  Tell yourself you are going to do 1 pushup a day.  It’s so stupidly simple to do that you can’t possibly fail.  Of course, 1 pushup will not get you fitter.  However, the chances are that once you are down on the ground you will bang out a few more is highly likely.  And once you break a sweat you might as well keep going.  But we have all started a plan or new year’s resolutions with lofty goals to do 100 pushups a day and failed after day 3.  The worst case is you do 1 pushup but on the hand, anything extra is something to be celebrated.  10 pushups is 10x your goal of 1 per day, but if your goal was 100 then it would be 10% of your goal.  Set yourself up for big wins instead of big losses.  
Start with the goal of eating 1 piece of fruit or 1 vegetable a day or drinking 1 glass of water.  
To be clear I am not selling you the 1 pushup and 1 glass of water diet and exercise program.  But it’s pretty close.  I’m 49 and I have two kids.  I don’t have a ton of time to workout.  I have some nagging injuries that keep me from doing some things.  I have a lot of excuses and so do you.  But despite that I workout and train and try to get better as I get older, both mentally and physically.  How many times have you said, I don’t have the time? You don’t need the best workout routine or the best trainer in the world or an expensive gym membership.  You need to get off your ass for 5 minutes and start a small habit of exercising during commercials or whenever you go into the kitchen.  Pick something that triggers you to get up and do that 1 pushup or drink that 1 glass of water or whatever it is.  Maybe you tell yourself you can only look at social media while you are stretching so it will force you to stretch a couple of times a day or, if you really hate stretching, it will cure you of your phone addiction.

Competition in jiujitsu is fun.  I mean, I don’t care for it particularly. It makes me nervous and anxious and I never perform my best. However, the need to test our skills regularly whether in day to day training or competition is an essential part of the sport.  I encourage people to compete at least to see if they like it and enjoy it.  For some people the thrill of competition is everything.  And finding that as an adult can be a great vehicle to improve their lives.  That being said, I have to put something into perspective. 

The real competitions start at Black Belt.  I’m not trying to be dismissive or condescending.  It is great that there are competitions open to students of all levels.  And the only way to improve at competition is to compete regularly.  I get super excited over my friends and students competing as anybody would. I cheer them on and I coach them and I watch their matches with great enthusiasm.  However, once someone is dominating the field and bringing home gold medals from multiple competitions, it just signals to me that they are ready to be promoted.  That is another good thing about competition.  It can signal when someone is ready to advance.  

I think it is important to remember this if you are competing and losing.  Yes, that gives you stuff to work on.  Learn from your losses! It also means you are where you should be regarding your belt.  And, third, you are probably going against people that are due for a promotion.  This is why I often say rather sarcastically that nobody cares if you are the world’s greatest white belt. In my mind the white belt world champion (I can’t believe that’s even a title) is just a blue belt that hasn’t gotten promoted yet.  And so on as you go up in ranks.   That’s not a bad thing (although I often say it with disgust). It’s just how it is.  

If you want to compete, then you have to be willing slog it out in the same division for a couple of years until you start making progress.  If you’re competing then it pays to be the world’s best white belt.  However that to me just translates to the world’s newest blue belt.  Then the process starts all over again as you move your way through the blue belt division for a few years.  

Enjoy the process.  One day you might be the world’s best white belt and the next day hopefully you’ll be the worst blue belt.  That’s the journey.  

“At the foundation of all training is the ability to make a better decision. Period.” My friend, Brian Mackenzie said this and it really resonated with me.  Making a better decision is all we have.  It’s all we can do to grow.  Each day we have hundreds, if not thousands, of decisions to make that will direct the course of our lives.  They say, “Hard training. Easy life.” To train hard is a decision in and of itself that will steer your life in a better direction.  Beyond that, how we train and what we do in the gym are decisions that also will have great repercussions.  The devil is in the details.

At its best, training is mental and emotional as well as physical.  If in the midst of hard training, I can maintain my emotional composure as well as my physical composure, I will have trained more than merely the muscles. Imagine an intense workout where I am asked to work hard for a given period of time.  After a few minutes the physical demand will start to show as I fatigue and need to slow down and take breaks.  However, the other struggle is emotional and mental.  I will start having feelings about how much my legs are burning. I will need to self-talk.  That monologue can be positive or negative. Furthermore, my emotional state might start manifesting as poor mechanics.  For example, when people fatigue, they often start looking down and hanging their heads, their expression turns sour, they rest their hands on their hips or thighs, they start sacrificing their form.  These are physical manifestations of emotional and mental fatigue.  Also how an athlete acts in the last seconds of the workout are indicative of how they act near the end of a contest. 

If we believe that “how we do anything is how we do everything,” then we should envision the athlete at the end of the match when they are fatigued and potentially behind on points.  We cannot expect them to rise to the occasion, instead we must understand that they will fall to the level of their training.  We look for the physical cues of their emotional content, the sour face and downcast eyes, the hands on their hips or thighs.  We listen for the self talk.  We see if they push through to the end or if they shut down before the clock winds down.  Those are not the types of athletes or people we want to develop.  We need to take the training room seriously.  We need to ask our athletes to make better choices about who they want to be when everything is stacked against them.  

Coach your athletes to make better choices not just physically but also emotionally.  Have them stop and listen to themselves.  Reframe their self-talk.  Make better decisions about their posture and their demeanor.  Train your athletes to push through to the end and not to give up prematurely.  Mental toughness is a trained skill as is emotional stability as is physical fitness.  Use that precious time in the gym to make better decisions about how you will be outside the gym.  

Sometimes the hardest thing is figuring out what is important and what is unimportant.  Once you figure that out, you can spend your time focusing on the important things and ignoring the unimportant things.  Too often we get caught up in shit that doesn’t matter.  The sooner we catch ourselves doing that, the sooner we can stop and get back on track.  Stephen Covey, author of The Seven Habits of HIghly Effective People says, “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.”