Little Big Things
When it comes to what’s important to improve, in both training and life, one of the things that people, including me, have a hard time with is looking low enough. What does that even mean? When you decide that you want to make your performance or health better, you (and I) often start thinking something like “What drastic, earth-shattering change can I make?” But maybe instead of looking so high to make change, we should aim a bit lower. A few examples, with the help of that math stuff that everybody loves so much, might help get the point across.
The fourth meal. It gives you “Oooooooo!”
I have a friend who came to me and asked me for a bit of advice on how to lose weight. He wasn’t fat or anything, just a bit soft around the middle. He told me about all of these massive overhauls he thought about making to his diet, the usual thing that people do when they’re itching to do better. He was clearly looking high. I knew him and his lifestyle pretty well, so I knew exactly what to recommend. “Stop drinking alcohol. Change nothing else.” He looked puzzled and I told him I was serious and to try it for two weeks. Luckily he listened. Two weeks later I saw him again. He was thrilled. “I lost 5lbs!” He told me that before he was having three beers a day and that each beer is about 150 Calories. That’s 450 Calories per day. “That’s like eating a fourth meal!” was his realization. He aimed low enough and therefore succeeded.
For training, here’s one most people don’t give too much thought to: warm-up sets. When most people do them, they just kind of do them without giving much thought to them. You load the bar, do the movement, load more, do the movement until you hit your work weights. Then you start to focus and pay attention. People are regularly asking me what set and rep scheme or 16-week program to do for their goals. They’re looking high. Here’s the problem. Let’s say you do four warm-up sets before you hit work weight. You work out three times a week. You train for a year. That’s 624 sets a year. Just imagine how much better you’d be if you did all of those 624 sets just right. If you really got your positioning right. If you really focused on squeezing the right muscle forcefully. I guarantee your training would be better without having to change or overhaul a thing.
Finally, here’s the recovery angle. We all like to think we sleep enough (have I beat this horse to death yet?) Let’s assume you currently get six hours of sleep per night. You’re only one hour short of the recommended seven hour minimum. You might think “Well, that’s not so bad. It’s just one hour shy. It’ll be fine.” True, it is just one hour. Here’s the thing. If you miss one hour of sleep per night and you do that for a year, that means you’re missing 365 hours. That’s 52 nights worth of sleep per year that you’re not getting. If I asked you if you’d like to do without sleep for almost two months per year, you’d laugh in my face and make some snarky comment. Yet many of us do that regularly.
“Look at that empty bar perfection. Truly the envy of all squatters.”
I get why we look so high to make things better. I don’t blame anybody for it. It’s exciting. It feels like doing this one big thing will give us big results. Let’s be serious, there’s nothing exciting about doing your warm-up sets right. Nobody is going to come up to you and say “You know, I saw how you really killed that set at 95lbs. You’re my hero. Please come fornicate with me.” Nobody’s going to notice that you now only drink one beer when you go out to eat instead of three. And nobody is going to notice that you slept the full seven hours for a few weeks, except for your family who have noticed that you’re no longer a grumpy bastard. They’ll be thrilled.
I have a sneaking suspicion that this applies way beyond training and diet. How many times have you decided “I’m going to be a different person. I’m going to treat everybody with love and compassion and be a ray of sunshine. I’ll be so virtuous that Mother Teresa would hang her head in shame when she compares herself to the paragon of virtue that is me.” Maybe that’s not the answer, though. Maybe the answer lies in that math stuff again. What about coming home and greeting your boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse? If that process of walking through the door, saying hello, and shifting into “being home mode” takes ten minutes, how much time is that? Ten minutes a day for five days a week for 52 weeks in a year. You spend 2600 minutes a year coming home. That’s 43 hours and 20 minutes. That’s a full work week of just coming home and greeting this person. How much better do you think your home life would be if, when you came home, it was with a smile and genuine warmth instead of being irritable and short with them? Maybe getting that right is the place to start. Maybe that’s the kind of low we need to look. Then again, I’m only 32 so what the hell do I know. I’ve still got a lot of life to live and growing to do. A lot of low to look. We all do. Don’t worry, we’ll figure it out.
