Fitness Framework

It's been about a month since I started the routines in the last post (morning routines.) I couldn't sustain 5,6,7 and 8, so these have dropped from mandatory-habit-installations to optional-tune-up activities.

Mental agility will be addressed later, but I needed to flesh out my physical framework and get it snapped into place so that it energetically supports my other projects and activities. This habit installation approach is working pretty well, as long as I maintain flexibility in discarding what's not sticking and replacing it with something better. Sometimes stuff sounds good in my head but doesn't mesh with my personality in practice.

So what's been established and now requires minimal to no effort to sustain:

• T-Th-Sa: martial arts for a total of 5.5 hours (est. 2 years ago)
• M-Sa: morning routines 1-4 (est. 1-2 months ago)
• M-W-F-Sa: 30 minute evening walk, hot bath and stretching (est. 2+ years ago)
• Sun: not a damn thing. by design.

This adds up to about 9.5 hours exercise a week, or 570 minutes. Every country and organization has their own guidelines, but 150-300 minutes a week seems to be the median recommendation for the amount of exercise needed for robust health. Regardless, there are some improvements to be made before I can just put this on autopilot. These are:

1. Need to lose about 15 pounds still and this mostly comes down to diet. Not as in any particular diet, but improving my eating habits and perhaps exploring some intermittent fasting regimes. I also do well with additional protein. The tact here will be to become more conscious and take small steps, the first of which is keeping a daily food and supplement diary. 
2. Add interval training on M-W-F. 2 minutes warm-up, followed by bursts of 30 seconds and recovery; starting with 4 intervals.
3. Add strength training to supplement interval training. Basic functional body weight routine: pushups, assisted pullups, planks/roll-outs, squats, + one wildcard; starting with one circuit, 1 minute per exercise and add one additional circuit per week up to 4.
4. Add recovery stretches from Stretch to Win to routine after hot bath.

 With these tweaks, I think I can move on from focus on my fitness to other areas of endeavor while being supported by a solid baseline of physical vitality. I will reassess in six months.

Morning Routines

A quest for the perfect morning. Why? Because a morning routine sets the tone for the entire day. It can't be arduous, unless a high level of discipline has already been established. But it can still culminate in a sense of personal accomplishment, so that whatever else happens during the course of the day, we know we are moving forward in important, incremental ways. My sensei is found of saying: "the end depends on the beginning." Starting everyday with this feeling of accomplishment makes whatever we do afterwards more fulfilling, even if we do nothing else  at all. 

Morning routines are very personal rituals. Once established, like any ritual, they are easy to maintain.The better adapted to support our specific requirements, with the resources they build, the more valuable they become to us. Here is mine currently, along with resource links and rationale.

1. Meditation. 30-45 minutes, immediately after I wake up I go to the next room and sit on my zafu. It prevents my mind from jumping into things I need to do and gives a nice buffer to start the day with equanimity. With a good zafu you don't have to twist yourself into a full lotus and can maintain a straight back with loosely folded legs. Meditation has a host of psychological and neurophysiological benefits. Besides exercise, it's the most important instrument in my toolbox.
2. Recumbent Bike and Rebounder. 5 minutes each. These wake up my legs gently after a long meditation and start the blood flowing again. The rebounder flushes the lymphatic system and strengthens the joints of my ankles and knees from many different angles. It also has a number of benefits.
3. Stretching for Sports Mobility. A 10 minute routine from Full-Body Flexibility. I've experimented with numerous yoga formats but finally settled on this as feeling the best. In time I might step this up to a 20 or 30 minute routine, but 10 minutes feels nice now, especially after the warm-up above.
4. Coffee. I start the coffee and hit the shower. At the end of the shower, whatever the season, I cycle to cold water for a minute or so. 
5. Dual-n-Back. Sitting down at the computer now with my hot java, I run through 10 sessions of this mind exercise for increasing fluid intelligence.
6. Chess Tactics. After which I solve 3 or 4 tactical problems on the chess board using CT-ART 3.0.
7. Anki. I haven't yet incorporated these next two as I'm still setting things up. Anki has things I'm learning: vocabulary, models, information, poems, etc. I am currently orchestrating it to add Japanese and then will be folding it into my daily.
8. Image Streaming. A great way to wake-up both hemispheres of the brain. I'm setting up an low beta SMR/entrainment session to use at the same time for even more benefits.

Before incorporating 7 & 8, this routine takes approximately 1 to 1.5 hours. It will probably bump up to 2 hours with the last two ingredients.

Assisted Living - Delegating the Small Stuff

The complexity of modern living can be smothering. Sometimes it feels like we spend all of our time just staying afloat ---to paddle forward requires twice the effort. Days, weeks and months go by, our dreams are clogged with laundry, dishes, meals, shopping, appointments, bills, cleaning, maintenance. It's easy to slip into reaction mode and just squeeze out little pieces of open sky from the onslaught of mundane responsibilities.  But then we put things off, things slip, and our daily duties start piling up like Magoo's closet. Our mind is constantly hyper, worrying about balls that we've dropped or things we've forgotten that might blindside us.

If only we had servants and staff to handle all this trivia so we can free our minds to contemplate the important stuff, the fun stuff, instead of this urgent stuff.

Well, modern times also bring unique opportunities for freeing ourselves if we use it strategically (or burying ourselves deeper in distractions if we don't.) I've been pretty successful with the former, and here's the approach I've used for several years to keep my head as empty as possible. Instead of servants, I have something better... agents.

1. Google Calendar. Anything that has to happen a certain date, I put on the calendar and forget about it. It's synced with my email client (Thunderbird) using Lightening (a calendar add-on.) When I check my mail in the morning I can see the whole week or month of places I have to be at a certain time and date. I share it with my mate, since we only have one car, we can both make entries and know whether we'll have transportation or whether we'll need to bike, bus or walk. It's synced with my phone and if I'm particularly paranoid about missing an important engagement, I can setup alerts or sms notifications. Very low maintenance, a few seconds to enter something, a few seconds in the morning to get a snapshot.

2. Journal. Here's where I put all the stuff that needs done but doesn't involve a specific date. I have a section for projects, active and queued to capture notes, a section for 'this week' and one for 'today.' After reading the mail and checking the calendar, I start with a blank slate for the day, I check the day before, to see if I want to carry anything forward, or refile it in projects and just write the stuff I actually plan to accomplish today. At the end of the week I review my active projects and any backlog and plan for the week to come. The Journal makes sure that, even if I don't do much any given day, I haven't lost sight of anything important. It's also a place I post to myself about whatever I'm thinking, much more productive than doing the same on social media or blogs.

3. Mind map. I do this once a quarter, it's basically a big map of what I want to do, explore, accomplish from a big picture perspective. It may tag projects from my journal but it's a holistic, 10000 foot view of all areas of my life, from fitness, to learning, enrichment, etc. Whenever I want to get my bearings, I look at the map.

4. Anki. I learn a lot of stuff everyday. Most of it I forget. The stuff I actually want to remember I just slap into Anki as an index card. Anki optimizes the review of information, with the minimum fuss possible, to retain a memory. It's designed so I spend the least amount of time reviewing in order to ensure I remember what I want. Anki takes only a few minutes a day and only reviews the stuff it knows you are about to forget.

5. Whiteboard for shopping. As I run out of stuff or think of things I'd like to eat, or stuff I have to pickup, I jot it down on a whiteboard with headings for places like Costco, Target, Supermarket, etc. When I'm ready to make a shopping run, I take a snapshot of the board with my phone and I've got my shopping list.

These 5 little assistants require very little ongoing maintenance, they are all basically just a place I can put something once, get it out of my head, and then go about my day with the assurance that nothing is going to fall through the cracks. I don't need to be reviewing stuff with wasted brain cycles all the time worried that I'm not keeping pace with the demands of living in a complex world.