by Jim Loehr
Exercise may be defined simply as any movement that is challenging to the body. What do I mean by that? I mean making a movement that falls outside one’s “comfort zone.” When exercising, you should not feel comfortable. The phenomenon known as the “postman’s roll”—that ten to twenty-pound spare tire that some mailmen carry around, and oddly never lose, despite the fact that many of them walk several miles every day—is easily explainable: During their habitual rounds they’re almost never exerting themselves.
Exercise means exerting yourself. Fortunately, we all have an innate sense of whether we’re pushing ourselves. On the other hand, when working out you should not experience pain; if you do, then you’re exerting yourself too much. One rule of thumb is that if you can’t hold a conversation while running, or can’t perform at least eight repetitions of any given weightlifting exercise, then you’re past the discomfort zone and into the pain zone. If that’s the case, then pull back. Discomfort, not pain, is what you want to feel.
Comfort: bad. Pain: bad. Discomfort: perfect.
Once you’ve come up with your preferred exercise(s), then there are really only three requirements:
do it outside the comfort zone
do it on a regular basis
be engaged when doing it
At the institute, how do we define “regular”? For aerobic exercise, our experience shows that to make a real difference, you must do it at least three times a week (if you can do more, great, but it’s not required), thirty minutes a session (ditto), with no more than two days of rest in between workouts. For resistance training, we recommend twice a week, on non-consecutive days, one to two sets per exercise, eight to twelve repetitions, with no more than three days of rest in between. Finally, with flexibility training—which people often skip, though it expands range of motion, and offsets the muscle contracting that occurs from resistance training—we recommend three to five days per week, after each exercise session, for at least five to ten minutes, two to five reps per stretch. More extensive exercise guidelines and explanations may be found at our website:
www.humanperformanceinstitute.com
The time commitment is hardly excessive. For a mere thirty minutes a day per week—and one or even two days off with no formal exercise—we guarantee you will see and feel noticeable, significant improvement in your cardiovascular fitness, muscle tone, and flexibility. Do anything less than the recommended regimen and we can’t make that guarantee.
The reason we can guarantee an impact with so little time commitment goes to the third point: When exercising, engage. Remember, it’s not about the time you give to something, but the energy. The passion, the commitment, the engagement. When you exercise, you needn’t give it two hours, ever; but you must give it your focus for the brief time you’re exercising. There’s a staggering amount of waste created every day in gyms across America as seemingly dedicated patrons run on treadmills or climb StairMasters while watching CNBC or ESPN or listening to their iPods, not at all connecting with the physical activity they’re supposedly “engaged” in. While I don’t discount the other benefits of such an activity—clearing the mind and socializing, to name two—if these lunchtime warriors really wish to condition themselves, they can do so, in far less time, so long as it’s concentrated, intense time.
We guarantee results so long as you do not multi-task during your workout, not even in your head. Working out with intensity, with engagement, is the only way to exercise correctly. “I ran three days a week for eight years and my fitness was never all that great,” said one client, “but I just kept doing it because it was better than nothing.” After coming through our program, he realized that, so long as he was engaged when exercising, he could verify more palpable results in less time. “I can really feel how the interval approach helps my heart and my stamina and my muscle tone so much more,” he said. His story is repeated over and over. Chris Jordan’s message is clear: Come to your workout to work out, to improve yourself physically—not to (literally) go through the motions. As I said earlier, if a world-class tennis player awaits his opponent’s 140 mile-per-hour serve with two thoughts in his head, one of which does not concern how to return a 140-mph serve, his chance of returning that serve successfully is 0%.
In the meantime, when you’re not working out, take the stairs, not the elevator. Take a walk after lunch. Walk to another department rather than e-mailing. Take a shower, not a bath. Take the stairs two by two. Avoid drive-through facilities. These are a few small but meaningful changes you can make during the workday, or just before and after it, to help you boost your energy levels and get to the next level of conditioning, on your way to a fitter, stronger body. Of course, the benefits of exercise go beyond just enjoying more muscle tone or not having to stop at the third-floor landing to catch your breath on your way to the fifth. A study published in the January 2006 issue of Fitness Matters showed that employees who worked out not only performed better than those who didn’t but got significantly higher marks for their “intercollegial behavior”—respect for their co-workers, a sense of perspective, and generally helping to create a better working atmosphere. More proof, once again, that good health is good business—even though far fewer than half of all major U.S. companies actively encourage exercise among their workforce.
GETTING YOUR STORY STRAIGHT ABOUT RECOVERY (REST AND SLEEP)
We’re addicted to speed and accomplishment. And each year the addiction appears to grip us more: We seem ever to be moving faster, demanding more, accomplishing more—or trying to. While numerous forces are responsible for this development, the number one culprit has to be Thomas Edison. After more than 100,000 years of human existence in which our levels of activity and engagement were determined almost exclusively by the answer to one question—Is the sun out or not?—the advent of electric light helped us to chuck our diurnal tendency. Spend forty-eight hours in Las Vegas and you’d hardly know that humans were ever creatures who treated the day for tending to vital business, and the night for replenishing one’s physical resources. I find it interesting that a considerable percentage of our clients will say, “I’m just a night owl; I’d like to change but I can’t”—as if a mere century or so of technological innovation could trump hundreds of millennia and more of primate hard-wiring.
We’ve become expert at moving horizontally—that is, crisscrossing our cities and our planet to check off the endless items on our life to-do list, one thing after another after another. But we’ve become far less skilled at going vertically—that is, moving cyclically, particularly in going from activity periods to refractory periods and back, from full engagement to full disengagement and back.
Yet to accomplish all we want, in ways that fulfill us deeply, we must learn better how to slow down, how to stop, how to disengage. If you really want your life to turn on, then you must first learn how to turn it off.
Now I realize that as you write, or rewrite, your story, it’s hard to include in it long stretches of inactivity. Good stories, after all, are characterized by action and verifiable change, not by extended silence and stillness. But, as unnatural as it has become for modern man and woman to pause even for a moment, I believe downtime is productive time. It is vital to include sufficient sleep and rest (recovery) in your story. Without it, not even the most nutritious diet and the most obediently followed exercise regimen can ever fill your tank with the energy you need to achieve maximum performance. Given the Type A, “alpha” personality of so many business executives, planning sufficient recovery into one’s life may be just about the biggest physical challenge they face.
A delicate balance must be struck between energy out (stress) and energy in (recovery). Spend too much energy without sufficient periods of recovery and the system will fail (as stated before, in sport this is called overtraining). On the other hand, too much rest and not enough exertion and the system also fails; that’s undertraining. The rhythmic interactions of stress and recovery create the pulse of life; the oscillation of en
gagement and disengagement optimizes energy management.
In our surveys, the average respondent scores a mere 51% on recovery (“disengaged”) and 47% on the sleep score (“seriously disengaged”). Even those who are “fully engaged” at work and in life score a very mediocre 70% on recovery. No other health index testifies to more regular abuse. While what constitutes optimal sleep varies by individual, to merit a great score, most adults would need to honor sleep for what it is—the mechanism by which we fully recover each day—and that would mean going to bed the same time every night for about seven and a half to eight hours of deep sleep, and take a thirty-to sixty-minute nap each mid-afternoon, Of course, almost no one who comes through our program gets that. And even if they’re regular about the time they go to bed and wake up, the sleep is usually not high quality (more about that in a moment).
Breaks—either short naps or periods of disengagement during the busy workday—are also vitally important. We recommend that they be taken far more often, roughly one every ninety minutes, than is typical for most people. After all, world-caliber athletes, whose performance can be judged more precisely and unambiguously perhaps than in any other field of endeavor, build numerous, regular, “intense” breaks into their training because they know that, without them, maximum effort and high-quality execution are impossible.
Cycles of full engagement can best be sustained with brief intervals of recovery (five to fifteen minutes) approximately every ninety minutes. The fitter one is physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually, the shorter the required interval of recovery that’s needed. Speed of recovery is usually an accurate measure of fitness.
Once again, though, very few people take breaks. The primary gripe? My company would frown on it.
Bad story! There are numerous ways to deal with that problem. Some rituals that people have used to help build in breaks during the workday: One client sets his watch to go off on the hour, at which point he stands, drinks water, and keeps working for five minutes while standing; another client always takes a short walk down the hall after finishing one type of work (e-mailing, say) and before starting another; another client has built in (at least) three five-minute breaks during the day—at 10:30, 1:30, and 4:30—to meet a colleague in front of the office and bask briefly in sunlight.
Because we generally don’t give the concept of recovery its proper due, when people actually do it, they do it poorly. For example, how often has this happened: After a ridiculously busy day at work you’re dead tired, you lie down in bed…and you can’t sleep.
Odd. Why would that be? Just when you need recovery most, the mechanism controlling it suddenly doesn’t work? One explanation is that, as anyone who regularly exercises knows, the physically fitter you are, the deeper and better you tend to sleep (called “delta sleep”); thus, the quality of recovery—disengagement—is directly linked to the quality of one’s physical exercise—engagement. In short, the beneficial effects of exercise continue even after you stop, even while you’re asleep! On the other hand, for those who are not so fit and, more crucially, who rarely engage fully in what they’re doing, it’s simply harder to switch completely off, because they’re never switched completely on.
Second, and just as important: It’s difficult to switch off, period. After such a consuming day at work, it’s tough not to still be thinking about all you just did and all that remains to be done; it’s hard to compartmentalize the work part of life and keep it separate from the recovery part. You have not fully disengaged, no matter how engaged you’ve been, no matter how tired you are now. Almost everyone multi-tasks these days, and maybe at times it’s necessary; but we must acknowledge that by doing so—by developing this habit of not being fully engaged by any one thing but fragmenting our attention across many things—we are likely compromising our very capacity to disengage, too. And with it comes a cost.
The most obvious cost is in how lack of proper sleep destroys performance, not to mention mood, at work and home. Shift workers—those who simply can’t get the kind of high-quality sleep that all human beings need—are at higher risk for all kinds of accidents, injuries, and maladies. Indeed, the consequences of insufficient recovery can be tragic—if, say, the overworked person is employed in a lifesaving job. Every year, approximately 100,000 Americans lose their lives due to medical errors. At a critical point in the majority of these cases, a wrong decision was made that could have been prevented. Certainly a healthy percentage of these decisions resulted because the practitioner was not fully replenished and engaged; in many cases, he or she had a seriously depleted energy bank account. If we read such a statistic in the newspaper—100,000 Americans dead by accident!—it would be enough to make us shake our heads, maybe even feel rage, disgust, sympathy. But what if a loved one were lost to one of these errors, an error that was absolutely preventable? It would be incomprehensibly tragic and pointless to us. Because someone’s story did not include in it a need to recover, it had tragic, permanent consequences for us and our loved ones.
A few other examples of how the lack of recovery—insufficient sleep—leads to tragic consequences:
Interns who work twenty-four-hour shifts increase the chance of stabbing themselves with a needle or cutting themselves with a scalpel by 61%.
The risk of crashing a vehicle following a twenty-four-hour shift increases 168%. The risk of a near-miss increases 460%.
Those who believe that they simply can’t take time out to rejuvenate—and that they’ll somehow still manage to get things done, and done well, on insufficient rest—are kidding themselves. To maintain optimal efficiency, the average man or woman must be turned off (in sleep mode) approximately one-third of every twenty-four hours. Highly fit individuals require fewer than eight hours. And, as stated before, going to bed early and waking up early, as well as going to bed and getting up consistently at the same time, will give you more energy than, respectively, going to bed and waking up late, or sleeping at inconsistently-set intervals.
Finally, while I’m not advocating that “night owls” should change their tendencies overnight (if you will), it’s important to remember that no one is locked into being this way, and walking around in a permanent haze of fatigue. (It’s a virtual guarantee that night owls don’t get a proper amount of sleep.) We have repeatedly shown at the institute that many people can permanently transform from “night person” to “morning person” in as little as thirty days, and thus to be aligned, once again, with their diurnal/nocturnal nature, those cycles that Edison and his cronies unwittingly made many of us ignore.
To live your new story, a simple but profound truth must be embraced: If you want to really turn your life on, then you’ll have to find some time to turn it off.
Nine
INDOCTRINATE YOURSELF
A large mass of ice floats in the ocean but only a meager percentage—5% or less—is visible at the surface.
Now suppose, as Freud did, that the complete iceberg represents our complete mind; the visible surface of the iceberg our conscious world; the vast, subsurface mass our subconscious world.
Freud was a smart guy. It turns out that the analogy is startlingly accurate: According to two studies on brain function (Baumeister and Sommer; Bargh and Chartrand), 5% or less of the mind should be classified as the “conscious part”—controlled by self-regulatory, willful acts—while an astonishing 95% is nonconscious, automatic, instinctive.
Let’s break down this iceberg mind. You’re mostly, if intermittently, aware of the material that’s just at the surface (sometimes above, sometimes below), stuff you retrieve instantly as it becomes necessary—your allergy symptoms, the deadline you’re scuttling to meet, the growing hunger in your belly, the dinner you and your spouse will be having that night to celebrate your twelfth wedding anniversary. Close to the surface but just below the waterline are data and experiences to which you have ready access, though at the moment you’re not aware of them: the stuff which, once an association to it is triggered, you
can and will consciously call up. These are not things you’re thinking of, for instance, while reading this sentence—you can’t be, if you’re fully engaged in reading—but as soon as I mention them, you can summon them in detail. The voice of a close friend talking about the progress he’s making in his fight against cancer; who you played tennis with last week; the moments surrounding your daughter’s birth; the traffic accident you were in five years ago; the high school math teacher who gave you your only failing grade. As soon as your mind is directed to such events and concerns, they instantly blossom into full consciousness.
But so much more affects our stories than what percolates above or just below the surface of our awareness. Unquestionably, our subconscious needs, conflicts, and childhood traumas can play havoc with our thinking, emotions, and perceptions. For example:
