Thursday, March 27th, 2008
“The purpose of a business is to create a customer.” - Peter Drucker
“I skate to where the puck is going to be.” - Wayne Gretzky
“Getting fit is about nutrition and exercise.” - Everyone
People, and especially us Internet businesspeople, seem to forget fundamental concerns of the things they care about. They get so wrapped up in these complex ideas, and want to do these complex things, simply because they can.
The interesting thing is that when you look at what works and what succeeds, it’s when everything you do relates directly back to the fundamental concern of your objective.
I see this happening all over the place, and especially with social media marketing. The problem is that people get lost in the gliss (that’s not even a word, but it sounds like it should be and it sounds like the kind of word I’d like to use. So I’m keeping it) and forget why they’re on Twitter, Facebook, or even have the business that they have.
What fundamental concerns does your business address for your customers? Do you reach out to them in ways that resonate in those areas 100%, or are you farting around, exploring new opportunities without the fundamental concerns of your business at the top of your mind?
This applies to everything. For example, in rock climbing, everyone who has climbed more than once knows it’s about your finger strength and shoulder strength. Everyone who has climbed more than twice knows that climbing is all about your footwork and balance. But few people focus solely on these things. Ultimately, the ones that practice yoga to improve their footwork and balance, that exercise their grip to improve their finger strength, and practice pull-ups until their shoulders are burning, succeed much more quickly than others.
If you’re trying to succeed at something that is seeming overwhelming, take a step back. Outline the fundamental concerns of the action (hint: it’s usually 3 things), decide which practices will most quickly develop your skill in those areas, and start practicing them more than anything else.
Friday, March 21st, 2008
Last week, I went over the elements of nutrition and macronutrients for a lean body composition. This week, it’s about fat loss.
Fat loss is fairly simple, but most people have incomplete or inaccurate ideas of what it takes to actually cut body fat from their body composition.
I’m going to talk about the three most effective ways for fat loss with exercise:
- Exercise to the extent that body fat, rather than food, is used as energy.
- Increasing your metabolism through cardio shortcuts.
- Increasing your metabolism through increasing muscle mass.
Exercise to the extent that body fat, rather than food, is used as energy.
The first option is pretty simple…basically, exercise long enough, and hard enough, to so that food energy is no longer sufficient to sustain performance. When food can’t be used for energy, fat is then turned into energy.
This is typically accomplished through a state called ketosis (remember, ketosis isn’t scary), where body fat is converted into energy. This is also accomplished through things like endurance cardio (bike training), strenuous sports like hockey, etc.
Increasing your metabolism through cardio shortcuts.
The second option is a shortcut with your cardio. Actually, two shortcuts.
High Intensity Interval Training, or HIIT, is the first shortcut and has been shown to increase your resting metabolic rate for a much greater period of time than much longer cardio sessions. In effect, you can often get more out of 20 minutes of HIIT training, than an hour on a bike.
The structure of a HIIT regimen is that you interval between intense aerobic activity, and moderate aerobic activity. This is done instead of a consistent ride on a bike or tradmill, for example. This study here, says it all:
After a 5 week conditioning period on a recumbant cycle, The High Intensithy Interval Training (HIIT) group perform sprints while the Endurance Training (ET) group performed a more traditional aerobic protocol, throughout the remaining 15 weeks. Both groups progressed in intensity. At the conclusion of the study, the HIIT group lost over 3 times as much subcutanious fat as the ET group despite expending less than half as many calories. For every calorie expended during HIIT, there was a nine fold loss of subcutanous body fat, as compared to the ET group.
Some ways that I’ve found to work best are alternating sprints with brisk walks, alternating jumping rope with crunches, or riding a bike on hilly terrain. As well, most of the newer exercise bikes have an interval training option.
The second shortcut is to exercise first thing in the morning, before breakfast. In essence, when you wake up, your body hasn’t had food (or food energy) since the last meal which may have been 8-12 hours prior. By this time, food has mostly been digested and any sort of intense activity would require energy. This energy comes from body fat.
So, doing HIIT first thing in the morning will work wonders. A couple/few pounds of fat loss a week, with a good diet, is not unreasonable.
Increasing your metabolism through increasing muscle mass.
Finally, one of the relatively unknown facets of fat los, is that muscle mass increases your metabolism, thus burning more calories. A number that I’ve heard is that each extra pound of muscle mass that you have burns up to an additional 50 calories per day.
So, how do you increase muscle mass quickly? Resistance (weight) training, and lifting s.l.o.w.l.y.
Despite the fact that it’s weight training, women will get toned with this kind of lifting, not bulky. Men can get noticeably bigger, depending on the intensity of the training regimen.
How it works is that by lifting weights slowly, you tear all of the various levels of muscle fibers. The way that most people lift relies on inertia and actually doesn’t stimulate the entire muscle. Lifting slowly get all of these layers and is actually much safer for you as well.
To maximize the effects here, you need 20-30 minutes of weight training, twice per week. Rest periods are crucial with this in order to give your muscles the time they need to rebuild themselves, hence only two workouts per week. In those 20-30 minutes, lift and lower weights with a count of 5-10 seconds up and 5-10 seconds down. Use a series of 6-8 compound exercises to hit the most muscle groups at a time, and do each exercise with an amount of weight that brings your muscle to failure after 6-8 reps.
The most common books for this principle are The Power of 10, and Slow Burn exercising, and strict research can be found here.
Wednesday, March 12th, 2008
Today, the Freakonomics blog had an article about how A-Rod got as good as he is. While I think that hockey is the only team sport necessary (rock climbing being the only individual sport necessary), it didn’t keep me from being intrigued by the idea of expert performance and reading through.
A couple of years ago, I listened to Freakonomics and really enjoyed it. One of the topics I hadn’t remembered was the idea that a specific kind of deliberate practice gets someone closer to expert performance than anything else.
The idea, pioneered by K. Anders Ericsson in this research paper, asserts that “deliberate practice” is the single most important factor for expert performance, where expert performers would be people like Michael Jordan or the world’s top surgeons.
This idea nearly destroys the idea of inborn talent.
At the same time, it further supports that you must not only find what you love to do, but then do it, and keep doing it with “deliberate practice.”
Deliberate practice, in essence, is:
1. Focusing on technique instead of the outcome.
2. The setting of very specific goals and time-lines for achievement.
3. Receiving quick, high-quality feedback and folding that back into your practices.
I think that one of the great things about online business is that the people who are out there now and are succeeding are the ones that already do this to a certain degree. You can’t get the education for online commerce, SEO, Social Media, etc from college. You have to be in the middle of it, day in and day out, constantly moving and progressing toward new goals.
Forums are where you get your techniques from, and analytics are where you get your feedback. Your goals aren’t about what’s realistic - it’s not realistic to be the next Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos - your goals are for your to decide.
I don’t mean that in the pep-talk kind of way. I’m not one for pep talks. People who have worked with me in the past, know that. Instead, I mean that in a very pragmatic kind of way. That it’s a belief that will result in greater achievement than others within the same realm of practice.
This same idea is inherent in resistance training for both hypertrophy and strength, it’s seen everywhere in sports, it’s most certainly seen in the marketplace, and through practices such as Six Sigma.
If you want to be great at what you love, rethink how you can deliberately practice those things you want to accomplish.
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