Just Show Up

When I was a teenager, my family went on a trip to Great Britain. We drove from London to Edinburgh and made one very special stop at a castle along the way. Now castles are cool and all (especially the ones with dungeons), but this particular castle in the North East of England was extra rad because it was the castle where my family’s name first appeared on record. We asked the tour guide when that was exactly and it turns out “Leadbeaters” have been around since before the battle of Hastings, but Durham was the first place we held a family seat. The tour guide said the date was hard to place because my family has a habit of just “always being there.” To my Mom, Dad, brother and I, this was a compliment. We’ve always joked our family crest should be the Woody Allen quote:

80% of life is showing up.

For my family, this quality has been steeped into our stories. My Mom's favorite is about my Dad. The summer before they met, he was getting a Master's Degree in Hotel and Restaurant Management at Cornell and landed an internship in Las Vegas. The Casino owner put him to work washing dishes from the buffet. It was a 6 week internship and my dad washed dishes, for free, all day for 5 of those weeks. On the first day of the 6th week, the Casino owner came down and said "What the hell?! You're still here?! After the first week, no one ever shows up for the second!" The last week of that internship, the owner didn't let my Dad leave his side.

On Valentine’s Day of 2008, I remembered that story and all the others like it. I was 60lbs overweight. I was depressed, angry, and just not the person I once was. I woke up that day with an overwhelming sense that my wife deserved better than me. I wasn’t physically attractive or capable. I was too unhappy to be sexy and too lazy to be ambitious. I needed to change, but I wasn’t disciplined. So that day I decided to do the only thing I knew I was good at: I decided to just show up. I told myself I was just going to go outside. Once I was there, I told myself I was going to run. Once I was running, I told myself I was going to run a mile. I nearly vomited before the end of the first block, but I had shown up. The next day, I showed up again and made it to the end of the block.

After a few weeks of running a little further each day, I knew I needed help. A coworker put me in touch with Steve Grubbs, a personal trainer who had been out of shape a few years prior as well. When I met him, I asked him what he wanted me to do. “For now,” he said, “just show up.”

In training, working, life, and love, never underestimate the power of just showing up. Even on days when you don’t want to do anything, just showing up and do the bare minimum is always better than doing nothing at all. 100 swings. 20 Pull ups. A paragraph. One quick drink. A made bed. “I love you.” In a world where everyone over-promises, everyone flakes, everyone says "sure" but no one commits to a time and place, just showing up is dangerously close to demonstrating integrity.

When I met Dan John and he asked me to come to the Coyote Point Kettlebell Club, I did. And I kept coming back. After a few weeks Dan said, “I knew we’d get along when you did the only thing no one else manages to do.” “What’s that? I asked. “You showed up twice.“

The Water or the Wave

My favorite book is The Magus by John Fowles. It was given to me by my first mentor, the late Dr. John Miller. The book is so good and I love it so much that I have never finished it. Every time I pick it up, I come across a sentence so breathtakingly perfect that I have to close the book and leave it for a while. The prose is just too much for me. I have been absorbing it in small doses for over 12 years and I never want to be not reading it for the first time. But this odd problem I have with the book is the very problem that the mentor character points out to his pupil when he discusses his problem with modernism sacrificing ethics for aesthetics: Utram bibis? Aquam an undam? "Which do you drink? The water or the wave?"

Nothing in nature is linear except time. Everything moves from one side of the middle to the other. When this is mapped over time, you’ll see that everything has a wave pattern to it. Summer and winter. We sleep and we wake. We work and we rest. We hunger and we feed. Action-reaction. Train-recover. In season-off season. These are the waves that we live in. And fighting it can be fatal.

Utram bibis? Aquam an undam? The water will quench your thirst, but the wave will drag you under. The mentor is ostensibly talking about art. But he isn’t. He is talking about the dangers of contrivance in the the face of reality. For him it’s aesthetics over ethics. For us it’s schedules, programs, diets, and routines. We look at these linear progressions and think that if we follow them we will make our goals. But we ignore the wave: progress-plateau. Most training programs and diets are six weeks long because any structured plan will work for six weeks and no structured plan will work longer than that. But plateaus are not failure. Progress is building the muscle, cutting the fat, getting more done, lifting heavier weights, throwing further, running faster and going harder. Progress is that rush when we think we are quenching our thirst. Plateaus are what keep us from getting dragged under.

According to George Leonard, mastery is about embracing the plateau. To continue practicing and training for the love of it and because it’s part of who we are. The plateau is when we are truly learning. Learning to integrate the technique with the strength. The tension with the relaxation. The new skills with the old. Because the plateau is when we are learning patience. The patience to let our unconscious catch up to our conscious. And the patience to continue on while we wait for the next wave of progress. 

So how do we do it? How do we get to our goals when there is no plan that will take us there? How can we learn to embrace the plateau? How do we drink without drowning?

“Plans are useless but planning is indispensable.” -Dwight D. Eisenhower

Plans may contrivances, but principles are reality. And doing something according to a plan will teach you a lot about the principles that underpin that plan. Look at every strength training program ever written and what do they all have in common? Pick up heavy things consistently but not too frequently. Every diet program? Eat less calories than you use, but don’t starve yourself to death. These are the principles that work and upon which every plan is based. These are the ways to keep moving forward toward your goals while you figure out what your next wave is going to look like. Master the habit of picking up heavy things. Master the habit of eating enough food. Drink slowly and embrace the plateau. The wave will come; and if you can recognize it for what it is, you might not drown.

My Struggles with the Healthiest Habit

What if I told you there was a single habit that could make you healthier, fitter, better looking, richer, smarter, and more frequently laid? What if I told you that habit had zero learning curve, took less than 10 minutes a day and was practically free? You’d probably ask if I have a bridge in Brooklyn I’m selling then punch me in the stomach. But it’s true: there is a single habit that once accumulated, makes all other habits possible. Keeping a journal.

We call them all kinds of things: training logs, food diaries, blogs, etc. You can do them with a pen and paper, in a spreadsheet, on a blog, or just with a bunch of post-it notes. However you choose to keep track of something, just the fact that you have to think about that thing every day puts you miles ahead on the path to mastering it. And having a written record of that something makes you even more likely to succeed at it. In sport psychology, the journal is the tool we try to get our clients on as soon as is practical. Keeping track of thoughts, feelings, trials, errors, stories, successes, perceived weaknesses, and noted improvements improves confidence, motivation, focus, and self-worth. Couple that with what you did and what you ate and you are looking at a surefire plan for sport performance.

I’m not going to sugarcoat it though, journaling is hard. It was my only New Year’s resolution and I was struggling after January 3rd. I have tried pen and paper, blogs, spreadsheets, email, notebooks, moleskines, 3x5 cards, fountain pens and sharpies. I have tried writing in the morning, evening, between clients, and right before bed. I have tried voice memos, iPhone reminders. If I had a 4S, I’d even try bugging Siri all day long. I’m a writer; I love to write and I love the power of words. I know how important this habit is and I have struggled more with this habit than any other one I’ve tried to accumulate. But from three months of trial and error, I have learned these tips.

• Start small. Track one thing that matters to you. I want to track 1,000,000 things but struggle to track 1 consistently. You can build on success, but you need to get into the habit of just writing something down every day first. Sometimes I have resorted to opening my journal every day just to write the date and the words: “wrote in journal.” You gotta start somewhere.
• It won’t be perfect. Don’t try to make your journal, blog, or diary pretty. I had a training log that was so beautiful I cried after writing the CSS. But I couldn’t write more than 7 lines per training session or it would overflow and mess up the pretty. It became so hard to think of what to fit in there I never used it. Result: fail.
• If you have a pre-bed routine, piggyback on it. I don’t have a pre-bed routine and only go into my bedroom to pass out at the end of the day. Not an ideal time to reflect and it only ended up messing with my sleep hygiene.
• Don’t pre-plan what to write. You aren’t always going to be eating three meals a day. You aren’t always going to be doing sets and reps of exercises. You aren’t always going to be tracking the same things. When I tried the spreadsheet route, I started thinking and planning my day in terms of rows, columns, and cells. This was hard, so I stopped. Use a medium with a lot of flexibility.
• Put it in your way. The last date I wrote in my journal was the date I found a drawer I could put it in.

Update: I wrote this article two weeks ago and since then have redoubled my journaling efforts. I am happy to say I have seen a great deal of success by **gasp** taking my own advice. I also got some great tips from clients of mine who have been journaling for years or even decades. Here is what I have worked out for myself and is working for me at the moment. I will try to do a follow-up article in a few months and we'll see what stuck.

• Private Blog. I started a private blog, picked a theme, and copied the "post by email" link into my iPhone address book. I don't care what the blog looks like; I never even go to the actual page. Whenever I want to update the blog, I just send an email to the link in my address book. If the update is longer than I want to write, I write a short version and go back later to give more details. If I have a goal, I send it as a quote to my blog. If I have a picture or song that inspired me, I post it. I can also either write what I ate in an email and send that to the blog or take a picture with my iPhone and post it. I don't get hung up on the details, I just record what I'm doing. Most importantly, the blog is the place where I aggregate all my habits.
• Small Moleskines. I bought a three-pack of the smaller moleskine notebooks for "cumulative habits." These are things like Grease the Groove where I need to record every time I do a set of pull ups or presses during the day. At the end of the day, I just email a summary to update the blog. I have another notebook that I take with me to the gym when I do O-lifts skills training. That way I can record the details of each rep and how I did as well as any other skills I am working on at that time. The last notebook doesn't have a home yet.
• iPhone Notes. Every day I take roughly the same supplements and do roughly the same lifts for Even Easier Strength. I have these "repetitive habits" listed as a note on my iPhone. When I take my pills, I email the "pills" note to my blog. When I do my Easy Strength, I email the "Easy Strength" note to my blog. A lower barrier to entry means I'm more likely to do it, record it, and therefore do it again.

The SAT: Seemingly Arbitrary Test

Everyone wants to get from Point A to Point B. But one of the great problems on the journey towards health and/or fitness is knowing if you’re making progress. How does a sprinter know he is improving? He runs faster on race day. But between races, he might have no idea where he is on his journey. How does a casual exerciser know if she is improving? There’s no race day for her, but every day she looks at herself and sees fat, soft, weak, lazy, out of shape, etc. Dan John says athletes know Point B really well (the Olympics, the Super Bowl, etc.) but have no idea where Point A is (I need to be working on my squat). Most regular people have no idea where they want to go with their body (Point B) but sure as hell know they aren’t happy with it at the moment (Point A). Both of these people are lost, albeit for different reasons and it’s my job to help both of these types of client on their journey. But the danger that faces both of these clients is becoming a Runaway Trainee. 

Some people who know only Point B and some people who know only Point A run the risk of treating every training session as a test of their improvement. They don’t know where they are or where they want to go, but dammit, they are going to get there first! A lot of trainers reward this die-hard mentality because they think it makes their job easier. Some gyms even select for it and shame those who don’t have it. But a Runaway Trainee needs just as much coaching as an unmotivated trainee because as Rif will tell you, “consistency trumps intensity.” 200 easy workouts plus a handful of well-timed hard workouts are always better than 10-20 random balls-to-the-wall workouts plus an injury. Everything the human body learns, it learns slowly. And frankly, with all due respect to Mr. Ferriss, you can’t hack mastery. But as a coach, I can help keep you motivated to stay on the path to mastery with a simple tool I call the SAT: “Seemingly Arbitrary Test.”

Most of the year, training should be pretty easy because there is rarely a time when training is going to be the highest priority in a client’s life. But simple, daily programs like Easy Strength, Easy Fat Loss, the 40-Day program, and even Feigned Retreat are not “maintenance programs.” They are slow cooking. You will get stronger; you will get leaner; you will get hotter; you will improve. The issue for the Runaway Trainee is that they can’t see the improvement in the training sessions. “2 sets of 5 at 70-80%? Where’s the kicker? Don’t I need to do an AMRAP?” The key is to separate training from testing, and testing from performance.

For an athlete, performance is on the field on game day. Training and testing should both improve performance. But if you take a sprinter out to run a 100m for time the week before a meet, she is either going to do well and be cooked or do poorly and lose confidence. One elite sprint coach’s solution? He has a spreadsheet with times in really odd distances that he has shown usually correlate to improvement in races. No sprinter knows what a fast 67m time is. But this coach can test without freaking out or wearing out his athletes. And if the athlete needs a confidence boost, the coach can tell them how they are improving by showing them the spreadsheet. Dan John tests football players in the weightroom with “The Eagle.” To make the Big Blue Club, you need to farmer carry two 24kg kettlebells between 8 sets of 8 double kettlebell front squats. It’s not a workout; it’s a test. You pass? You make Big Blue, think you’re stronger than Thor, and crush your opponents on the field. You fail? The test is so seemingly arbitrary that the athlete’s performance will unlikely be affected on game day and he has a new goal in the weightroom. Win-Win. The coach knows Point A, and the athlete can stay focused on Point B.

For the casual exerciser, performance is usually when a co-worker she hates comments on how good she looks. Training and testing should both boost confidence (which is what people notice more than hotness). But just like sprinters think they know how fast they need to run 100m, people think they know what the number on the scale or tape should be and they think they know what the pictures should look like (sadly, they actually don’t thanks to years of brainwashing from magazine covers). Another solution? Seemingly arbitrary tests of strength or stamina. My friends Antonio and Annie have “Strength Day” at their gym every 6 weeks. Their clients show up with friends and family and they all perform tests of pull ups, snatches, swings, etc. and track their improvement. Then they eat meat and kale. The atmosphere is light, the work is hard, and the confidence boost is absolute.  Most importantly, this set up allows Antonio and Annie to tweak the training sessions lighter or harder based on the immediate needs of the client without them freaking out because they aren’t “seeing results.” In the absence of Point B, Antonio and Annie have given them Point A+.

Practical Advice for Daily Training

I have been training every day since the day I met Dan John. I have encouraged most of my clients to do the same. As a result we have all gotten stronger (without getting sore) and I have amassed a modest amount of experience with the Grease the Groove, Even Easier Strength, Easy Strength, 40 Day Program paradigm of daily strength training. I even braved a workshop in Reno about it. Here are some of my tips for how to do daily training right.

• Read the programs. I shouldn't have to write that but no one ever does it.
• Go lighter than you think you should. If it feels heavy, it's too heavy. To quote the super-awesome Karen Smith (who trained for the Ironmaiden Challenge using only Easy Strength), "It should feel like you're cheating."
• Don't be embarrased. If training at 50% of your 1RM is embarrasing, then train where no one else is looking. Train at home or in a corner of the gym. Then come back in 6 months when your 50% is more than anyone else's 100%.
• It's not a workout. Don't think of your daily training as a workout. Most of us think of working out like this: "ok, I gotta drive to the gym, park, change, foam roll, stretch, do my correctives, activate my glutes, do a few warm up dynamics, 100 swings, 25 squats, a few pull ups and push ups, hydrate, Easy Strength, a kicker, a cool down, hydrate, metabolic drive protein recovery drink (or choclolate milk), shower, change, and drive back home." If you think of it that way you won't do it every day. Hell, that was exhausting to type! I've banged out an Easy Strength session while double parked with my flashers on. And that's because...
• It's a habit. Daily strength training is like brushing your teeth. You should think of your training like this: "I just brushed my teeth but I don't need to leave for work for another 15 minutes. Oh! Easy Strength!"
• Make it as convenient as possible. Be smart and preview your pitfalls. When I got busy with school, I switched my program around so I could do it in my living room. When my clients travel, I write them a program using daily bodyweight exercises.
• Don't sweat. These daily sessions should be 10-15 minutes long and so light that you don't even break a sweat. The genius is in the weekly volume, not the daily intensity. Not sweating also makes it way easier to schedule.
• Integrate it into your day. Since the rest times don't really matter, you can either choose to bang the reps out as fast as possible or do other stuff in between them. My wife calls her daily training "The Faffing Workout" because she can do chores around the house between sets. It takes longer, but she loves it because she feels like she gets more accomplished than "just working out."
• It's about getting strong. Daily strength training will probably not make you less fat. It might not improve your conditioning. It will probably not fix your anterior pelvic tilt. It will not wash your car, do your taxes, or paint your fence. It's a strength training program. Plan your other training accordingly and do not depend on your strength training program for entertainment.
• And finally, once the weight feels light... add more weight! Otherwise it's not a path, it's a rut.