"It's not that we need to do more, but that we need to focus on less."
F.O.C.U.S.
Also, in this weeks issue:
Exercise - Simply 3 Workouts
Nutrition - What Your Brain Eats
Sleep - Supercharge Your Brain Upon Waking
Treatment - Time to Reflect
Intellect - How to Instantly Kill Focus
F.O.C.U.S. - Follow One Course Until Successful
Life goals, daily tasks, work projects, hobbies, school, chores; you have a lot to accomplish. Do you feel like nothing is getting done, or you aren’t making progress? Narrow your focus and follow one course until successful.
With fitness, focus on improvements in a single area. What aspect of your fitness needs your attention; is it exercise, nutrition, sleep, injuries? Make a big push in one area at a time until it becomes a habit or you’ve achieved the level of success you want. Of course, this goes beyond fitness and into all areas of our life.
As a rookie Massage Therapist, I was trying to learn Thai massage, sports massage, cupping therapy, kinesiology taping, neck treatments, anatomy drawing, headache treatments, and so on. Guess what I learned? A little of everything, which is nothing at all when it comes to putting it into practice (jack of all trades, master of none).
Curiosity is great, but everything is far more enjoyable when you dive deep into it. I’ll spare you the life story, but this lack of focus is the story of my life. If I were to make any progress, I had to focus.
No matter how big or small, focus your efforts on one specific task until completion. There are a lot of variables, so come up with a daily strategy that works for you. Refine this strategy until your focus is optimized. You’ll know because your progress will feel rapid and significant.
Here are a few tips (surprise, I have hundreds):
Be surgical in what you select and prioritize tasks by importance or benefit.
Be disciplined in not allowing distractions to interfere. It can take 23 minutes to get focused after being distracted—schedule time for distractions.
90 minutes for tasks requiring deeper focus.
2 hours per day max for learning and retention. Imagine how quickly you could learn something if you practiced it every day.
Put blocks in your schedule devoted to a single focus.
Have themes for days (e.g., Tasty Tuesdays is for nutrition)
Set deadlines. Treat tasks like food; if it takes too long to complete, it expires.
I have a to-do list named “Focus”. It is tiny and reserved only for what’s important. I also have a to-do list called “Life Priorities” for long-term goals to remind me what I want to achieve in a lifetime (I review it to remind myself to stay on track, probably a sign I need to pick a focus).
Hire a Coach or Mentor to save you the time from making the same mistakes they made. Could you hire me to Coach you? I’ll get your ass focused.
Follow one course until successful.
Simply 3 Workouts
A proper training program will have dozens of exercises, sets, reps, tempos, and other complexities that make a program the most effective approach to training. It can be overwhelming and even discourage you from doing the workout. My Simply 3 workouts you can do without much thought, equipment, or time required. You pick 3 exercises and do them for a set amount of sets, reps, or time, but you still need to warm up.
Here are some examples (the possibilities are endless):
Bodyweight Simply 3
Push-up x10
Squat x20
Jump Rope x30
Barbell Simply 3
Hang Clean x5
Front Squat x10
Bent Over Row x15
Kettlebell Simply 3
Swing x20
Pull-Up xMax -OR- Single-Arm Bent Over Row x5-10e
Single-Arm Push Press x5-10e
Dumbbell Simply 3
Swing x20
Pull-Up xMax
Single-Arm Push Press x5-10e
TRX Simply 3
TRX Squat Jump x10
TRX Inverted Row x10
TRX Ab Rollout x10
Simply 3 Workout Template Examples
Legs, Push, Pull
Power, Strength, Core
Single-Arm, Single-Leg, Conditioning
Workload Examples
3-5 rounds
As many rounds as possible in 20-30 minutes
EMOM (Every minute on the minute)
Countdown Sets (10 reps, then 9 reps, then 8 reps, and so on)
Pyramid Sets (1 rep, 2 reps, 3 reps…all of the way up to 10, then back down)
Partner Sets (I go, you go)
One exercise at a time for 3-5 sets
One exercise every 10 minutes
Limiting your workouts to only a few exercises allows you to focus on technique and intensity. Top athletes are the best because they can handle the monotony of doing only a few exercises all the time. For you, this may be a time to break up your routine, learn a new skill, give your body a new stimulus, or even add a little “fun” into your workouts.
A couple of my greatest successes in training were when I focused on doing fifty chin-ups a day and another time when I only did back squats five days a week for a month. I even looked forward to these exercises because they were familiar and continuously improving. Now, this is not a sustainable program because I was leaving many areas untrained, but for a two to four-week push, it worked great, physiologically and psychologically.
What Your Brain Eats
Set aside how your diet makes your belly look and realize that your brain relies on food to function best. The brain requires 45 nutrients; the brain creates some, and some come from food.
Top 10 Brain Foods
Avocados - blood flow
Blueberries - antioxidant (the brain is highly susceptible to oxidative stress), memory
Broccoli - vitamin K for cognitive function and memory
Dark Chocolate - focus, concentration, stimulates endorphins
Eggs - choline for memory
Green Leafy Vegetables - vitamin E for anti-aging; folate for memory
Salmon, Sardines, Caviar - Omega 3 for anti-aging and creating healthy cell membranes
Walnuts - vitamin E, antioxidant, anti-aging, mood
Water - 80% of your brain
Supercharge Your Brain Upon Waking
This effective technique amazes me every time. Write down everything you can recall in a dream journal when you wake up. As you write, you’ll remember more of your dreams, but what’s truly amazing is the effect it has on your brain throughout the day.
You’ll notice that your focus and ability to think have been supercharged. Much like a warmup improves performance in a workout, a dream journal improves your brain performance.
Time to Reflect
Undistracted thinking is an absolute requirement if you want to achieve any level higher than you are currently at.
A common trait among the world’s highest performers is they set aside time, often daily, to think and reflect without distraction. This is the time to read, journal, and think deeply. This is not meditation; that’s something else. This is where you devote your brainpower to process either your personal or professional path in life. If you journal, it’s a great time to review your journal to see if you’re still on the path you once wrote about.
My time at sea, on watch without distraction, just the ocean and me, gave me hours every day for thinking, way too much time. This period set forth some deep thoughts and planning of my future. Returning to civilization was severely detrimental to my deep thinking. It took me some time to regain the routine of daily reflection. I had to build it back into my schedule, and so should you.
Prepare to get to know thyself.
How to Instantly Kill Focus
If you grab your phone first thing in the morning, you're programming your brain for distraction. Give yourself at least an hour before you use your phone. Aside from starting the day distracted, you're also using energy on less important tasks when your brain is near its prime for cognitive function.
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Modern Athletics is on a mission to coach people to feel their best every day and succeed in life by prioritizing their mental and physical fitness. We believe in a world where fitness empowers people to feel confident in themselves, grow athletically and intellectually, and have an excitement for life that inspires others.
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