present tense fitness

False dichotomy is one of those nickel phrases college freshmen toss around to sound smart. I know I’ve used it before exactly for that purpose (along with paradigm. Paradigm’s a good one for that first Thanksgiving visit home from college). But just because the phrase is trite at this point doesn’t make it entirely without merit. I can think of no other example than the false dichotomy between yoga and strength training.

I’ve talked to yoga people who have a warped view of what strength training is, and it tracks with the popular view of why one would chalk up one’s hands and attempt to pull a few hundred pounds from the floor, swing a heavy kettlebell around, or press a dumbbell over one’s face. Vanity. Narcissism. Testosterone. General bro-rificness.

And I’ve talked to strength people who have a warped view of what yoga is. That it’s just stretching, or that it’s woo-woo Oprah-fied soft fitness, or that people do it when they want to avoid actually working hard.

These sound like straw man arguments, but I promise you I’ve heard them in one capacity or another recently from otherwise well-informed, smart people.

Generally I’ve found that the people who engage in such arguments back and forth generally don’t know a lot about the exercise modality they’re busy bad-mouthing.

I don’t enjoy yoga. I actually think it’s safe to say that I find it torturous. I find it to be boring, and rather than leaving a class feeling energized, rejuvenated, and relieved of stress, I feel almost the opposite of all of those things.

Yoga isn’t for me, in other words. But it might just be for you! And even though I’m a barbell, kettlebell, and dumbbell guy I think yoga is one of the best exercise practices one can learn.

• It can be progressively overloaded to an extent, so body transformation is possible.
• The right studio can be an empowering and comfortable space.
• It promotes mindfulness, body awareness, and good posture.
• You can take it anywhere–hotel rooms, vacations, and studio apartments.

And though I love the gym, I recognize that there’s a significant portion of the population out there who will never love strength training the way I do. But everyone needs to do some form of strength training if they wish to build and maintain muscle, develop mobility, and enjoy quality of life during the aging process.

Yoga can fill that void. It is a form of strength training. Instead of barbells, one is using gravity and body weight to build muscle and mobility. The downside of yoga as I see it is its comparatively limited capacity for progressive overload: with good programming and solid nutrition, I can keep adding weight, and thus new stimulus, to a barbell. There’s a ceiling for that kind of overload with yoga–but this amounts to the picking of nits when one considers that more than two in three adults in the United States are obese. Chances are if you’re a couch potato right now that the overload for which yoga allows will be enough to change your body and get you stronger for several months to come (if your nutrition is on point and you’re getting enough sleep).

On the other end of the spectrum, yoga enthusiasts tend to downplay the mobility requirements of barbell strength. The strongest people I know happen to spend a lot of time on warmup, mobility, cooldown, and recovery. Not exactly meathead principles we’re talking about. Don’t confuse the guys you see doing bicep curls in front of the dumbbell rack at your big chain gym for the type of strong, mobile, athletic men and women I’m referencing. You can’t truly get strong unless you’re also mobile–it’s just too difficult to avoid injury otherwise.

These two seemingly disparate communities ought to learn from one another. If you’re a gym rat, challenge yourself to take a yoga class–and don’t judge the process or turn it into a competition. Allow yourself to be humbled. (You will be humbled.)

Likewise if you’re a multiple-day-a-week yoga practitioner, I challenge you to learn some basic strength training movements. If yoga is your only form of strength training, your biggest gaps are likely to be pulling movements (like pull-ups and rows) and weighted squatting or hinging movements (like squats and deadlifts). By supplementing your yoga practice with some targeted strength training movements you’ll likely gain muscle mass and burn a bit more fat than you might otherwise from yoga alone.

The key takeaway is this: stop being so judgmental of things you don’t understand. Yoga and barbell training have been resilient against other, more dubious exercise trends. There’s a simple reason for this.

They work.

Do you have any rituals? Bedtime? Work? Morning?

Life comes at us in waves, and we don’t often have the time or take the time to appreciate the details. One way to combat this passivity, this letting life happen to us, is to develop some rituals around the simplest day-to-day activities. My rituals may look nothing like whatever would turn you on, but I thought I’d share some of mine to give you an idea of what taking the time to smell the flowers can look like in your own life.

The Ritual: Morning coffee

Every morning I walk over to Press on Wayne Ave. to grab a coffee. I can make my own coffee at home (which would be a nice ritual in and of itself), but I make it a point to walk to Press, chat with the baristas, and take in the morning. My mornings sometimes start really early—like 6 AM early—so I’ll hit Press after my early clients.

What it does for me

I get to drink a world class cup of coffee, but more importantly, I’ve found connections at Press that I don’t know I could have found anywhere else. I ALWAYS have interesting conversations there with the owners, the people who work there, or the diverse range of former Ohio State football players, musicians, artists, moms, dads, and occasional misanthropes one is likely to find there. This ritual is especially important if I’m having a bad day or I’m feeling especially stressed about running my own business. Sure, I can brew my own coffee at home, but once a day, every day, you’ll find me at Press. The ridiculously good coffee is just the starting point. I’m really there for the community.

The Ritual: Sitting and Reflecting

Lately, I’ve been finishing my training sessions and heading over to work on a new personal training studio in the Oregon District. Friday evening I finished at 6:30 PM and worked straight through the weekend until about 9 PM on Sunday.

But you know what? I finished every one of those evenings by just sitting. Running one’s own business can be stressful, time-consuming, and frightening, and it’s easy to get lost in those less-than-fun emotions. (Lately, I think I’ve mostly been frightened). So every night, no matter how late, no matter how tired, no matter how ready for bed and no matter how bloodied my hands (cleaning agents + dry hands + cinderblock walls), I just sat. Admired our work. Thought of the future. Imagined how happy my clients will be to walk into the space.

What it does for me

A funny thing happened when I allowed myself that reflection, which could have seemed like a frivolous waste of time. I relaxed! You might not be opening up your own shop, but at the end of your work day you can take a few moments in your cubicle, your office, or in your truck to take in the weather/view/birds/sunset/trees. I’m not saying you’ll be able to turn a terrible day into a good one, but that taking the time to sit with what you’ve done can be a great way to lower the temperature and remind yourself that you’re okay. I know I need those reminders a lot.

The Ritual: Writing for Dayton Most Metro

Every Tuesday evening I sit down to write this column whether I have the time or not. (Lately I have not had the time). I go through the usual writer’s process of freaking out because I’m worried people will hate what I write, freaking out because I’m not sure I have anything useful to say, and freaking out because that’s what I like to do.

Then I just sit and let my mind wander to what I’ve been thinking about lately. What’s been on my mind? What questions have I been receiving online or from clients? What do I want people to know?

And then it happens. I just start typing. And in the end, I’ve been delivering these columns once a week without fail since I signed on.

What it does for me

Writing more than anything else is a discipline. Having this weekly deadline has forced me to be more mindful throughout my week about what I’m seeing, hearing, and feeling. I have to be aware of what the people around me are asking consistently because I know at some point I’m going to have to sit down in front of a blinking cursor.

Sometimes commitments can be soul-sucking regrets. But this Dayton Most Metro column has made me a better and more attentive coach because it has forced me to notice patterns, and the writing process itself has forced me to sharpen my own thinking around some complicated subjects.

Is there a project you can take on at work that would stretch you? A volunteer opportunity? Could you resolve to write a letter or an email to someone who’s been important to you at least once a week? The difference between an assignment and a ritual is mindset–and you’re totally in control of that.

Your rituals

The point of all of this stuff is to give yourself permission to notice the small, beautiful things that surround you every single day. We know the world is a cruel, hard place. And we’re here and often there’s nothing we can do about the cruelty or the hardness. But we do possess the power to take a moment every day to find what’s good in us and what surrounds us.

The fitness industry has made great strides toward making women feel more comfortable in weight rooms across the country, but there’s still some work to be done.

Twenty years ago fitness types were still selling women the fiction that they might “get big” if they lifted heavy weights and didn’t spend countless hours “doing cardio.” Based on what I hear from new clients this old myth persists among many women, but it seems to be dying a slow death thanks to fitness thought leaders like Jen Sinkler and Neghar Fonooni, among others. There still exists a subtle roadblock, however, that prevents more women from abandoning the elliptical machines and Zumba classes in favor of the efficient transformation technique that is weight-bearing exercise:

Competition.

I asked an acquaintance in the gym yesterday how her training was going, and she somewhat sheepishly replied that she was doing her best, but that she wasn’t training as hard as others. It was a revelatory answer to a throw-away question meant more as a means of polite conversation than a piercing inquiry. I know her a little, and she’s impressively strong and impressively conditioned–but she probably couldn’t place at an elite level of any sort of Crossfit, powerlifting, or figure competition. My unscientific analysis indicates that she’s probably fitter than 90 percent of the women in her age group, yet she was somehow embarrassed that this wasn’t “enough.”

Strength training is among the most efficient delivery systems for body and health transformation that there is. You can develop your conditioning, change your body composition, and push a host of health markers in the right direction by incorporating things like squats, deadlifts, presses, and rows into your weekly routine. Yet I worry that somehow this message is getting garbled into the notion that barbell training is only for people interested in Crossfit, powerlifting, or Olympic-style weightlifting.

I think part of the problem is that most big commercial gyms lag behind barbell style gyms when it comes to stocking plentiful free weights, and the barbell style gyms that exist do tend to have at least somewhat of an emphasis on competition, personal records, and Instagram stardom.

Barbell training isn’t just for competition. It can be an important slice–but just a slice–of an otherwise well-rounded and interesting life full of art, music, friends, and good food. Approaching the squat rack doesn’t mean that you have to buy knee socks and booty shorts. All it means is that you’re interested in the most important movement pattern you can learn to do well (squat), that you’re interested in building muscle and bone density, and that you’re interested in being strong and mobile well into your 80s.

One of my worries about this post is that it wreaks of condescension, that I’m presupposing that women aren’t competitive. I’m not arguing that women somehow aren’t as competitive as men. What I am trying to do is grapple with the reality that the fitness industry generally has been an unwelcoming place for women when it comes to strength training. While I do think some of those walls are coming down–having been smashed by the strength of female leadership–I do think that the correlation between barbell training and competition does prevent some women from feeling completely comfortable pursuing strength. And I happen think that’s a shame.

 

 

File this post under gross gender-based generalizations.

In my experience women are most insecure about what they look like, which leads to a host of issues around not eating enough, feeling shame, and misguided attempts to “lose weight.” Social pressures and cultural discrimination against aging women have something to do with this. Just ask any woman in Hollywood when well-written, three-dimensional roles start drying up. Amy Schumer hilariously skewers this hypocrisy in the definitely NSFW clip below (seriously don’t click if salty language offends you). The basic message in Hollywood is one that I think gets filtered through the rest of our culture, which is, “women, don’t get older.”

Men, on the other hand, tend to feel less secure about what they can do. My theory is that one can split men into two categories: men who go to the gym in their teens and twenties, and men who don’t go to the gym during that timeframe. The men who go to the gym in their teens and twenties spend a lot of time at the bench press and doing various curl movements to achieve big arms. The men who don’t go to the gym as young men perhaps never will, especially if they’re not able to perceive how their unfit status holds them back from enjoying greater quality of life.

I spend a lot of my energy with older male clients trying to get them to understand the benefits of gradually progressing, avoiding injury, and working on movement patterns instead of ego-boosting exercises like bench presses and dumbbell curls. They look over and see the kid in his early twenties pressing a bunch of weight over his head and they immediately think less of themselves if they can’t lift the same weight. I have to work hard to convince them to do things like warm up properly and stretch post workout. They just want to load a bar with as much weight as possible and move it, especially with their upper bodies.

That’s not the most difficult obstacle to overcome for me as a coach. The biggest hurdle consists of the guys who used to work out in their twenties but stop going to the gym because, well, they got older, and they’re not as strong as they used to be. So rather than face the indignity of a long warmup and lighter weights they just stay home and talk about their “bad back” or “bad knees.” Sound familiar? I spend a lot of time thinking through how to convince guys like this to go to the gym and most of the time I feel like Sisyphus pushing an Indiana Jones-sized boulder up a hill.

Women in my experience are more willing to ask for help in the gym because they haven’t internalized the cultural pressure to already know everything about it. Remember, a woman’s only job in our culture is to stay as young-looking and thin as possible. So for the women who seek out personal trainers, yoga instructors, or Pilates coaches they’re more willing to say “help.”

I’ll be forty next month, so I know a little bit about the aging male demographic. And I know more than a little about ego because I’m constantly battling my own in the gym. There’s a voice in my head who sees stronger men as confirmation that I’m less than rather than as an inspiration. It’s not difficult to see how this destructive thought process could turn–even subconsciously–into “I’ll just not work out” with some sort of half-baked justification thrown in to massage the ego.

I’ve had too many conversations with the children of aging parents who report that they just cannot get dads to pay attention to their health and wellness for me to stay silent or ignore gender-based culture differences. If I had one wish for my female readers it would be for them to learn how to love their bodies as they are. For the men? It would probably be to learn how to swallow their pride, ask for help, and learn how to get stronger step-by-step. (Actually, I’d have the same hope for women. The learning to love their bodies thing is almost always the first step toward a willingness to strive for step-by-step strength).

If you’ve been struggling to get your dad or grandfather into the gym, try talking him through the logic.

1.) He doesn’t have to wake up hurting every day just because he’s older.

2.) Strength training isn’t just for young guys. The benefits go well beyond the aesthetic and performance.

3.) He can still build muscle well into his 70s–it’s never too late to start. Even in his 80s, he can still see neurological benefits from strength training that will manifest as improved movement and strength.

As for the aging women? Let’s talk next week…

 

Ta-Nehisi (pronounced TAH-nah-HAH-see) Coates won the National Book Award this year for his book “Between the World and Me,” written in the form of a letter to his son. The book is an extraordinary exploration of what it means to be black in the United States of America. As I sat down to write this week’s column, I found myself returning to the text because of Coates’ emphasis on the cumulative effects of racism on the black body.

Coates uses the word body (or its variants) from the opening sentence of the book to the very last paragraph, and the repetition is intentional. He recounts a scene in which his young son is inconsolable following the announcement that the police officer who shot Michael Brown would not face punishment.

“What I told you is what your grandparents tried to tell me: that this is your country, that this is your world, that this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it.” (emphasis mine)

As far as I know, Coates hasn’t devoted much time in his writing to fitness and health in the traditional sense. But this emphasis on the word “body” betrays an intuitive understanding of what it means to be a healthy human being. One of the great things about literature–and art generally–is that we bring our life with us into the piece. So I read “Between the World and Me” as one of the great arguments in favor of holding policymakers accountable for the health of the citizens they lead. And I read it in part as a rebuke to those of us who don’t treat our bodies with the respect they deserve, especially given how easily some people’s bodies can be destroyed in an instant.

Too deep for a fitness blog? Maybe. But I’ve been having a lot of conversations with people lately about their bodies, and I’m disheartened to hear the way many people think and talk about the one body they’ll ever have.

“I don’t have time to cook,” they say.

“Working out feels like a waste of time,” they say.

“Why would anyone work out five days a week?” they’ll ask.

With each statement and each question, my interlocutor suggests that they don’t take their body seriously. They they think the food they put into it is only an afterthought; that ensuring proper movement of the vessel that will carry them along in their existence on this planet is time better spent on other things; that the spreadsheets at work are more important than having the strength and energy to spend quality time with the people that they love.

When I respond to their questions and statements with reason and fact, usually people agree with me. Their body IS important. Nutrition IS important. Movement IS important. So more people share Coates’ intuitive understanding of the human body’s primacy than it would appear given how most of us choose to spend our time. The question becomes, then, how do we close the gap between what we know to be important and the values we exhibit on a daily basis?

I’m not sure I know the answer. I wouldn’t call myself a cynic necessarily, but I know the stubborn tug of job, television, and eating out can be difficult to surmount. I know this because I’ve had the same struggles even while I work as a fitness professional. To say that I’m well-known in certain Oregon District restaurants would be a colossal understatement, for example. I happen to hate our kitchen and the dishwasher we inherited doesn’t appear to have been operational within the last ten years. (It only “sort of” cleans the dishes). So I get it: cooking doesn’t always seem like a fun option. But when I find myself slipping into the abyss, I remind myself of my body. It’s my body.

Normally I’d end a column like this with a numbered list of things you can do starting right now to turn your life around. Today I just want to ask you to do this. Take off all of your clothes. Stand in front of a full-length mirror. Be honest with yourself about what you see–and what you’d like to see.

This is your body. It’s the only one you’ll ever have. Contained within it is your emotional health and memories; contained within it is your ability to interact with the world around you and the people that you love; contained within it is your capacity for expressing the physical manifestation of love. How ought you to treat such an important and impressive vessel? What choices could you make right now to reflect that?

I’m not a registered dietician, but as a fitness and lifestyle coach I’m often in the position of giving general nutrition advice. More often than not, the people who come to me aren’t seeking advice on managing a disease. My clients usually just want to feel and look a little better.

I’ve been trying to do more thinking lately around my process with people and the patterns I see with clients. I realized that when it comes to nutrition, probably the advice I give most often might surprise you.

Eat more.

People are shocked to hear this. They think they can’t “lose weight” because they’re eating too much. “What am I doing wrong?” they’ll ask me. Then they’ll show me a food log that indicates skipped breakfasts, an iceberg salad for lunch, and then a low-carb (or virtually all carb) dinner. And they’re coupling this woefully inadequate amount of food with cardio. Lots and lots of cardio. Sure, this method of starvation and sweating on the treadmill might help them lose weight initially, but usually they’ll plateau. Why?

1.) Don’t try to lose weight

The first problem is that they’re trying lose weight in the first place. A nasty drug habit can help you lose weight. Losing weight shouldn’t be the goal. Strength should be the goal. And if strength is the goal then you need to eat well to be strong.

Starvation means you’re losing body weight, but a lot of it’s going to be muscle. And if you’re a woman this vicious cycle of starvation and cardio could be wreaking havoc on your hormones, ensuring that you retain body fat and work against your goals.

2.) Eat more, but eat well

Eat more. You mean, I can have the donuts?

Not so fast. Eat more, but eat more vegetables, eat more good sources of protein, and more of a variety of foods. If you’re eating for strength, you need nutrient dense foods to ensure your body is functioning properly. If you’re eating for strength, you need to make sure your body has a ready pool of amino acids from which it can draw to build muscle. If you’re eating for strength, you need to be eating at regular intervals (breakfast, lunch, and dinner).

3.) Cardio is for stress relief and heart health, not fat loss

If you like to run, run. But don’t try to run off your excess pounds. The goal with body composition is to change your metabolic environment, which is a complex stew of hormones, tissues, biochemical reactions, and gastrointestinal function. You’re not going to run off that piece of cake you had a Janet’s going away party in the conference room. But you can, with the right combination of strength training, sleep, stress management, nutrition, and conditioning work ensure that the piece of cake won’t make much of a difference in your overall body composition.

4.) It’s difficult to overeat (actually) healthy foods

If you fill more than half your plate with vegetables at every meal, you’re going to have a difficult time eating too much food. This is where a little education goes a long way. I coach people all the time who tell me during our first meeting that they “eat healthy.” And then they proceed to tell me about the healthy spaghetti meal they ate for dinner the night before.

Spaghetti doesn’t seem unhealthy, does it? And since I’m not an advocate of low-carb dieting, I’m not hating on it because of the pasta.

But the way most of us eat pasta is terrible for us from the most basic plate composition standpoint. Few vegetables. Little fiber. Way more starchy carbs than is advisable. Probably not as much protein as we need. See how quickly that healthy spaghetti dinner becomes a starchy sugar bomb with just a little understanding?

If you think you’re eating healthy now, check yourself. Gluten free does not necessarily equal healthy. Low fat does not necessarily equal healthy. Homemade does not necessarily mean that it’s good for you. “All natural” doesn’t mean anything at a all.

So yes, eat more, but make sure you’re eating well with an eye toward strength and fitness. The rest will usually take care of itself–as long as you’re eating your veggies. And lots of them.

I’m filing this column today from New York, a city I’ve always loved and that has always welcomed me as if it were my home. As I sit down to write this for my actual hometown of Dayton, I can’t stop thinking about what the two cities could learn from one another in the area of fitness.

It won’t surprise you to learn that New Yorkers in my training experience are ultra-competitive. Take a yoga class in New York and you’ll see people falling all over themselves to be the “best in the class.” Take a spinning class and you’ll see fights (literally sometimes) over bike assignments and noise. And there’s a nefarious drive for women to be able to wear high-fashion clothes—few of which are designed for people who squat regularly. A number of my female clients told me when I trained here that they wanted me to help them be skinny without any hint of muscle tone.

But the thing New York does have that I’d like to see more of in Dayton is a baseline assumption among working professionals that fitness is a fundamental aspect of life in which it is worth investing both precious time and money. As I suggested above, this isn’t necessarily altogether for positive reasons; people are competing for mates, attention, and status in a city of more than 8 million people. But whatever the reason, I spent less time as a trainer in New York convincing people of the utility of staying fit than I have to in Ohio.

At first glance, this seems strange because our state is a bit of a fitness capital in this country. Just an hour down the road, Columbus hosts the annual Arnold Sports Festival, a fitness-centered exhibition, competition, and learning conference. Columbus also is home to the legendary Louie Simmons Westside Barbell gym. And right here in the Dayton area we have a number of serious facilities like The Dirty Gym on East Second Street. Given our training roots, we seem primed in Dayton to infuse a culture of fitness into the fiber of Gem City culture. But we’re not there yet. Why?

I went to a benefit recently in which I was giving away a free personal training session for people who donated to a worthy cause. The conversations I had that night were fascinating, because most of them centered on the idea that strength training was some mythical thing that bodybuilders and professional athletes do, but not “merely” regular folk with jobs and kids and responsibilities. One person even referred to me as a bodybuilder, which I can only assure you is not a mistake that anyone who knows what a dedicated bodybuilder looks like would ever make.

The issue for Dayton when it comes to fitness, then, despite Ohio’s well-earned reputation for excellence in strength, is that too many of us see fitness as something that other people do. Only fitness “freaks” like bodybuilders would waste time in the gym and paying attention to what they eat. Only a self-centered narcissist would bother hiring a coach to help her achieve her fitness goals.

Fitness isn’t just for freaks and selfish people or fancy pants New Yorkers. It’s for all of us. Gay, straight, young, old, fat, thin. I promise you that your quality of life, the way you feel when you get out of bed every morning, the way you see yourself, the way your lover sees you, all of these things will improve if you get stronger, leaner, and more mobile.

How many hours a week are you currently dedicating to fitness? The data say too many of the people reading this column might be able to answer zero. If you’re one of those people, how would you improve your quality of life measurably if you—

• were stronger.
• were leaner.
• were more mobile.
• had better bone density.
• had better stamina (including in the bedroom)?

So the real question might just be this: why don’t you think you deserve to feel better than you do now?

I read a great Jane Porter piece this week about the importance of solitude that I suspect will have a big impact on the way I talk to my clients about their health. You should read the entire article published in Fast Company online right here.

Before diving into the relevancy of Porter’s argument, a quick reminder about the positive health effect of strong social ties. Researcher, writer, and speaker Kelly McGonigal argues persuasively that we can dramatically alter the negative effects of stress in our lives by simply thinking about it differently. Beyond just thinking about stress differently, however, McGonigal sites research which states that strong social ties can act as a sort of steroid for our resilience.

“…when you reach out to others under stress, either to seek support or to help someone else, you release more of this hormone, your stress response becomes healthier, and you actually recover faster from stress. I find this amazing, that your stress response has a built-in mechanism for stress resilience, and that mechanism is human connection.”

This is profound. And when I first heard this, I immediately began thinking differently about how to make my personal training clients stronger. I talked a lot more about calling friends, writing letters to important people, and taking time to cultivate relationships. And you know what? My success rate at helping people transform their bodies rocketed upward.

Enter Porter’s Fast Company article. Perhaps you’re wondering what a piece about solitude has to do with strong social ties, and thus, our health. Let’s take a look at Porter’s reporting.

She quotes Sherry Turkle, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher, on the link between solitude and human connection.

“How do you get from connection to isolation? You end up isolated if you don’t cultivate the capacity for solitude, the ability to be separate, to gather yourself. Solitude is where you find yourself so that you can reach out to other people and form real attachments. When we don’t have the capacity for solitude, we turn to other people in order to feel less anxious or in order to feel alive. When this happens, we’re not able to appreciate who they are. It’s as though we’re using them as spare parts to support our fragile sense of self.”

As I rapidly approach the age of forty, I find myself valuing “real attachments” with people who share my values. A younger, more insecure version of me sought out relationships with people who allowed me to feel cooler but didn’t share my values. These proved to be empty, and sometimes painful personal experiences. Now that I take more time to understand who I am and what I value, I find myself forming more real attachments. Not coincidentally, I’m also stronger and healthier than I was at any point in my twenties.

This isn’t hocus pocus. It’s not an episode of Oprah. There’s no prize under your seat. This is the softer side of strength and we ignore it to our own detriment.

If the benefits of solitude are real, then what are some concrete measures we can enact to make the most of it?

1. If you travel for work, listen or read instead of watch. I traveled to Seattle this week and came home with a notebook full of ideas for my own business. I resisted the urge to kill time with a movie, and instead let my mind wander along with John Coltrane. Planes are ideal for this type of pondering because we don’t often have the chance to just sit with our own thoughts.
2. Take a walk. Busy people often ignore one of the best exercises they can because they don’t view it as intense. But walking–especially outside–has a whole host of benefits for mind and body.
3. Don’t be afraid of silence. On your next drive to work, don’t turn on the radio. Don’t plug in your iPhone. Just drive. Pay attention to what you’re doing of course, but be alone with your thoughts.
4. “Make an artist date.” This is directly from the Porter piece itself (which again, you should read in its entirety). Essentially this is scheduled time for yourself once a week when you are alone at a museum, on a scenic walk, or anywhere you can experience something new or interesting. I’ve recommended a version of this to executives that I coach who often resist because they view it as a waste of time. Those who have made the time for their version of an artist date, however, report having more space in their brains for strategic, deep thinking. This is something all of us could use, from homemaker to C-Suite mover and shaker.

Traveling for work can be among the most disruptive factors to staying fit because it can introduce variables for which even the most disciplined and organized find it difficult to account. So let’s walk through how to stay well on the road with an eye toward nutrition, fitness, and wellness.

Nutrition

• Good — I trained a client in D.C. who traveled often to the middle of Indiana. Her food options were limited mostly to fast food and a Super Walmart twenty minutes away. I coached her to do the best she could with what was available. That meant approximating to the extent possible a mix of protein, healthy fats, and vegetables at every meal—even using McDonald’s in a pinch. (Think Egg McMuffin with a side salad or fruit cup). Her travel wasn’t ideal, but she was able to do just enough to stay healthy.

• Better — If you’re traveling in a bigger city, your options for food even if you don’t have access to a grocery are often better. Fast food chains like Sweetgreen (D.C., Boston, L.A., New York, Philly) are thriving precisely because they offer health-conscious people affordable, fast, and convenient ways of eating well.

• Best — You’re able to identify a grocery store near where you’re working or staying that has a good selection of fresh fruits, vegetables, and delicatessen. Using a grocery on the road can allow you to mainly stick with a nutrition plan consisting of primarily whole foods and fresh ingredients. Even if your work travel involves command performance dinners, you’ll be able to control your breakfast and lunch by shopping for your food daily.

Fitness

• Good — If you’re stuck in a hotel that doesn’t have even a modest gym, you can still maintain some mobility and strength on the road. Search YouTube for videos from people like Neghar Fonooni and Jen Sinkler for bodyweight routines. Another great option on the road that would complement your wellness goals would be downloading a good yoga app and doing some sort of practice daily.

• Better — One of the things about the fittest people you know is that they think about their fitness when planning trips. So, for example, they’ll identify a favorite hotel by how good the gym is. This might take some trial and error, but you too can figure out which hotels have the best gyms for your fitness needs. Stay at those places when you can, use the gym, and maintain or even enhance your fitness on the road.

• Best — Find a local gym convenient to where you’re staying or working. If you belong to a national chain, you often can work out for free when you’re on the road. (I’ve found that even if you’re not a member, many clubs will allow you to work out for free if you just tell them that you’re visiting). You might even treat yourself to a personal training session when you’re traveling. Some folks even have a roster of trainers around the country in the different cities to which they travel.

Wellness

• Good — You’re mindful of how you’re feeling and you do your best to get to bed at a reasonable hour. Just as you might have chosen your hotel for the gym accommodations, you might also be aware of which dwelling on the road has the best blackout shades and temperature controls to allow you to sleep in a cool, dark room. You limit caffeine consumption to the morning, and you don’t drink too late into the evening because alcohol can act as a sleep disrupting stimulant.

• Better — You make it a point not only to sleep well, but to have some experience outside of work during your travel. Given the tight schedules often associated with being on the road for work, this can be difficult. But you can try things like walking a few extra blocks to your first meeting so the route takes you by an interesting building, popping into a photography exhibit for 15 minutes, or researching an interesting restaurant that we don’t have here in Dayton.

• Best — In addition to the above, you develop a wellness friendly routine, or ritual even, that allows you to maximize relaxation and sleep, while also minimizing anxiety and stress. You have a “go bag” ready at all times that you take with you on your business trips. It consists of tea from home, your favorite soaps, and guilty pleasure magazines that you can read to relax before bed. You’ve come to grips with the fact that travel is a part of your professional way of life, so you’ve developed patterns specifically designed to maximize your wellness on the road. Work travel becomes a way of recharging, giving you a welcomed opportunity to do strategic thinking.

One of the mistakes I see often is working professionals pretending that travel is not fundamental to their work life. If you’re on the road every month, then you ought to take some time today to figure out how to stay healthy in hotels, airports, and train stations. Your nutrition, fitness, and wellness options might not be optimal, but with a little planning you can maintain or even enhance your health with travel.

Lifelong fitness isn’t effort, it’s not willpower, and it’s definitely not innate ability. It’s the answer to the question: what do I value as demonstrated by how I spend my time?

Make a list of what you value and be completely honest with yourself. Include things like relationships, sex, family, professional status, and maybe something like volunteering. Make it your list. Rank the items on the list if you’d like.

Now, do an inventory of the most recent three days of your life and where you spent your time. Break it down hour-by-hour and put your activities into buckets (television, family, work, fitness, etc.)

Did your values list match where you spent the preponderance of your time?

If you ranked family first on your list, for example, how much time and energy are you spending on them versus fantasy football, television, or going to happy hours?

Now before we go any further, let’s establish one thing: you are not to judge yourself for what’s on your list or if there’s a disconnect between your values and where you’re spending your time. This is an information-gathering exercise, not an inquisition.

So, if, say, you’re way into video games I don’t want you to feel sheepish about that. I want that on your values list. I want you to be open with yourself about video games being something that you love to play. I want you to be purposeful about playing video games. (Seriously.)

But if there’s something on the list of things to which you devote an inordinate amount of time that you don’t actually value—watching television is on this list for a lot of people—then be aware of that and work to curtail the amount of time you spend on it, replacing it with the things you do value.

I’ve found that a lot of people who are sitting on the sidelines of fitness actually value many aspects of it. They want to feel better. They want to look better. They want to be sick less often. They want to be able to move without pain. They value fitness, but there’s a disconnect between the value they place on it and the lives that they’re living. This disconnect is a recipe for sadness, anxiety, and discontent.

The reason people remain discontented with their lives isn’t laziness. Often they’ve never stopped to think about where they’re spending their precious time. Seasoned and respected professionals, they’ve never done an analysis of their lives the way they might for a customer’s issue, a patient’s illness, or a boss’s request. And sometimes the most pernicious of all reasons is shame. They’re ashamed they’ve never spent time on fitness and now they’re fat/injured/weak/deconditioned/unattractive/insert your own negative self-talk here. Finally, many people don’t believe that they have the self-efficacy to achieve lifelong fitness, so why invest the time to try?

For those folks who don’t value fitness and health, often the reason for the notable absence of things that a sustain quality of life is a lack of self-esteem. Yeah, yeah, I know. It sounds squishy and touchy feely. But stay with me for a second.

If self-efficacy is the belief that one can do something (I can learn how to squat and press a weight above my head), then self-esteem is the belief that one deserves to do something (like achieve a fit body). You already know what this negative self-talk sounds like. “I’m so fat and disgusting. I deserve this. I did this to myself.”

If you fall into the category of people who value fitness but aren’t currently making the time for it, I encourage you to inventory your values and your time without judgment. Eliminate the extraneous and emphasize that which will make you happier and healthier.

If you fall into the category of people who don’t value fitness, I hope you’ll ponder whether you’re lacking the requisite self-esteem to take care of the one body you’ll ever have. If you are, then there’s a strong chance that you won’t get to the gym without first working with a good psychologist, psychiatrist, or counselor to help you troubleshoot the way you think about yourself.

Tell me if this sounds familiar. You’re planning your day, or maybe your week. You’re trying to get fit, so you schedule in some gym time. You’ve been trying to eat healthier, so you know you need to leave some extra cooking time. Maybe you’re making it a point to drink water instead of soda and you have your water bottle ready before you go to bed so you can grab it on your way to work. Because you know all of these things have to fit in with the rest of your life, you’ve scheduled in meetings, work tasks, and even some down time with your significant other.

You do all of these things and you feel like you’re on the right path, but then your plan goes awry. You stay up a little late catching up on emails or watching Sportcenter, and your entire morning is thrown off when you sleep in an extra thirty minutes to try to catch up.

How could you do all of that planning and still get thrown off your game?

Here’s your answer: everything in fitness begins and ends with sleep, including your nutrition.

You can’t work as hard in the gym—or even make it to the gym—if you’re not sleeping seven to eight hours a night.

You can’t recover as well from a hard training session if you’re not sleeping seven to eight hours a night.

You won’t make sound nutritional choices if you’re not sleeping seven to eight hours per night. (Don’t believe me? Compare your willpower when you’re fully rested to your willpower when you’re sleepy or fading.)

 

If all of this is true (and even intuitive), why don’t we schedule sleep when we fill in our calendars? What we do instead is pack our schedules full and then hit the pillow whenever we get to it. But given the importance of sleep to everything we do, a wiser choice would be to begin our daily or weekly calendar with seven or eight hours of sleep assumed and then build the rest of the schedule around that time.

When I started doing this for myself, a surprising thing happened. I panicked because there didn’t seem to be as many hours in the day, but I found myself getting stronger, injured far less frequently, and far less prone to illness. I had fewer waking hours, but I was more productive in the hours I had left after building in a dignified night of sleep.

Americans especially seem to pride ourselves on how little we’re sleeping, but study after study shows that this is a terrible approach for both productivity and health. When you’re thinking through your schedule tomorrow and beyond, I encourage you to start with sleep and build from there. If you’re like most people, you’ll be better able to function at work, more likely to go to the gym and work hard, and more likely to make sound nutrition choices.

Of course, once you’ve made the choice to get more sleep you need to make sure you actually shut your eyes and drift off.

• Turn off electronics an hour before bed.
• Sleep in a cool, dark room.
• Think of three things from the previous day for which you are specifically thankful. Don’t just say, “family,” say, “I’m grateful for my sister’s great advice when I asked her about switching jobs.” This gratitude practice forces your brain to search for positivity, which can decrease anxiety and make falling asleep easier.