A few weeks back, in spelling out the importance of 'finding the floor'— the bare minimum, by contrast to a practice “at its most —for want of a better word —complete.”
A better word, because a practice is a process, so it doesn’t finish until you do.
And a better word, because no matter how painstakingly punctilious we might be, a mere property of our meat puppetry means that whatever you’re not directly addressing is in a near-immediate state of decline.
So it’s always a game of whack-a-mole. Or as Thomas Sowell more elegantly observed:
There are no solutions, only tradeoffs.
But since then, I’ve fielded a couple of queries as to what ‘complete’ might be. And over the years, many, many queries as to what my fitness practice looks like.
I’ve offered glimpses here and there, including in these pages, but, even on the understanding that it is ever-changing, laying it all out in ‘complete’ fashion is something I’ve resisted— a fantastic business opportunity missed.
If this twit proved anything with his 5-hour pre-work routine, roundly and rightly ridiculed, it’s that this wankery is now passé, but I had a good 5 years of looking that particular gift horse in it’s freshly flossed mouth when it was de riguer for any ‘coach’ worth their chops to roll out their day and rig, and another 5 years before that when— in marketing speak— I could have been swimming alone in a morning routine blue ocean—setting the trend.
So many ‘likes’ gone begging.
But you have to like yourself first, right? And this bignoting makes my skin crawl. If that was the first 5 hours of my day, and I then shared it with you, I’ve got a pretty good idea what I’m doing next. And you don’t want to see it.
So, for all the reasons I do what I do, you can trust that none of it is performative.
And yet, for all the many (hundreds of) thousands of words I’ve written on the subject, the concept of an all-things-considered fitness practice is not only easily misinterpreted, but over the years, in seeing people graduate from these pages to conversation to coaching is always so. Every time.
Those who come to realise a practice of their own will tell me they’d read about it here, sometimes for years, and indeed that was the catalyst — and why wouldn’t it be— but, still, it was nothing like they imagined.
For all my protestations to the contrary, people confuse the taking of tiny moments with the hustle of productivity porn, or seeing everything in life as being directed towards one (fitness) end.
Not a fault of my writing, I’ll hasten (if not humbly) to add—it’s more a limit of language. Full stop. And especially the language of fitness: so denatured and warped as to be devoid of meaning.
Because my fitness practice is nothing like that.
But language is what we’ve got. And while I’ve gone into some detail on the training and dietary side of things, I’ve been less explicit about the ‘broader lifestyle’ side of the practice, and it could be these darker areas of the map where these monsters are imagined. So today—and I suspect the next couple of weeks, at least— I'll pull back the curtain just enough to further help illustrate these ideas with, spoiler alert, nowhere near enough detail for it to be taken and followed as your own.
Not because I’m saving the good stuff for paying clients, but because the idea here is to help.
And because you might believe that, coming from the fitness expertise and OG of fitness practice promotion, what I’m doing would be better than anything you could come up with
But you would be wrong.
And even if you accepted it wasn’t quite right, a quick copy and paste would more than offset the hassle of doing the tough stuff.
And you would be wrong there, too.
And not only because aiding and abetting your laziness ain’t my bag either, but because to do so would be to miss the point entirely.
A point you might not yet understand, but one I’ll prove straight after the boring but necessary reminder of the Leftfield definition of fitness—fit for purpose—by telling you that in a typical day, there are roughly 20+ actions I take towards that end.
Now, hopefully before you start shouting about how busy you are and… yes, yes— first pause to remember that I’m talking about me, not you.
That’s the point. My practice addresses my needs in my life.
Where it might begin to be of some relevance and use to you is to understand that I’m including drinking coffee in that total.
And, hey, you probably do that too!
So we’re off to a flying start. The benefits of coffee are well-documented, and although I’d usually have 2 or 3, I’m counting it as 1.
And if you don’t drink coffee, don’t feel left out, because I’m counting sleep as well.
As can you. And look at that, now we’re all in this together. And indeed, it’s this perspective that makes the idea of an all-things-considered fitness practice less an aspiration than a reality.
You have one, already, in one form or another. Everything helping by its presence, or failing in its absence—and helping in its absence or failing by its presence— to make you fit for purpose.
To really get things rolling, you can add eating and brushing your teeth, and there are at least a couple more—drinking water, walking— to help further put that number in perspective, but from this point, I want you to think less about perspective and more about resolution.
Although we’re counting them, eating, sleeping and walking are more markers of existence than any real sign of positive intent, and we have greater ambitions for our ‘purpose’ than that. At this surface level, the aptly-acronymed SAD (Standard American Diet)— Australia and NZ are little better— tells us there’s every chance that ‘eating’ is, on balance, not helping.
Only as we move deeper can we begin to mark distinctions in behaviour, both more positive—useful towards that ‘fit for purpose’ end, and more particular—specific to us, in our lives.
Beginning with the lowest resolution of all:
EXERCISE.
There are lower resolutions, obviously, but they don’t concern us here at Leftfield, where we start from the premise that fitness is a must.
While exercise can help in that regard, it’s a lottery and a thoroughly unskilled, low-res way to go about it. Of course, this marks not the beginning of the process for most, but the end and, indeed, is exactly where ‘do what you love’ nonsense lands you.
You could do a lot of exercise and barely move the needle towards fit-for-purpose, worse still, you could do a lot of exercise and move the needle in the wrong direction. If you consider everything that might fall under the umbrella of ‘exercise’, it’s close to meaningless, so if we’re even remotely serious, just like eating, we’re going to have to drill down a bit.
My next layer is simply:
TRAINING
As distinct from exercise. It ensures my efforts are directed to my physiological demands and that all other variables— intensity, load, volume, rest etc.— are equally inferred. But for demonstration purposes, we’ll zoom into just the following departments:
RESISTANCE
POWER
CONDITIONING
MOBILITY
Although all are necessary, one or another might be making itself more urgent in any given moment, and here, as at every level, you triage your priorities by following the order of operations. You can further drill down into each of these, almost infinitesimally, and in addressing your needs, you can then apply some discernment towards preferences, as I have.
Currently, in those departments respectively:
I’m following a combination of a Dan John KB program and a (knee-specific) one from ATG. (No affiliations)
Slowly reintroducing (now x2) hill sprints (1/week)
Seadily increasing running mileage (2-3x/week) and adding Norwegians (1/week)
Rehab specific drills + Hanging.
And that’s where we’ll leave the many worlds of the TRAINING universe. And where we’ll leave things for today. We’ll look closely at other areas next week, but in the meantime — right now— you can do something super useful to help towards your fitness practice.
Pay attention to what you’re thinking when you read this and when you look at that list above. Because it might well be something along the lines of:
Well, he must have a lot of time on his hands—he doesn’t have kids, so that explains it. Or;
He’s a PT. He just knows how to do this stuff; it’s easy for him.
Any and all variations thereof.
A defensive posture explaining, justifying, and rationalising why that couldn’t be you is not only not helping your cause, it cuts any possibility of progress here off at the knees.
And, I do know how to do this stuff, and it is easier for me. As for the whole ‘time’ thing, maybe, but you haven’t considered that— and why would you, because you don’t know—for reasons I’ll go into later, my practice makes demands on my time that yours won’t.
Because we’re different. As underlined at the start, this practice is mine.
But remember, in some shape or form, you have a practice too. And what I’ve detailed above is how— in just one area— I address the physiological dictates of my body.
Dictates not a million miles from yours.
I don’t detail it to boast, and although I concede it might, nor to overwhelm. It may not be apparent yet, but the idea of this series is to demonstrate how this understanding, this framework, makes things easier.
You don’t need to fire more arrows if you aim better. Move away from the blurry static and noise of the ineffectual and even harmful, to a clear signal directing all effort to where, when, and how it is needed best.
Giving you the time to do everything else.
And a body and mind fit to do it.
____
Enjoy your weekend.
- OLI
'...a mere property of our meat puppetry means that whatever you’re not directly addressing is in a near-immediate state of decline.'
Ha ha. Dark, but fair.
That's nothing compared to the link in this week's post!
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