The New Year is always a natural time to reflect upon the past year while setting your sights upon what you would like for your life in the year ahead.
I would be pretty happy just not getting killed by a super bug, or the side effects of the jab to protect against said super bug, or the ever deadly explosive diarrhea.
Assuming I survive all of the above, I wanted to share with you today dear reader (hi mom!) my personal plan of action for the new year. A plan that maximizes my own personal and mental health so that I can be the best I can be for my family and clients.
It will also help me age gracefully, which as I am starting to see sucks pretty bad!
He melted! I’m gonna spend more time in the cold……
Since this is America, and we always have to go big, I call this my Big Triple DDD Plan of Success!
D #1: Ditch Drinking!
I haven’t said anything to anyone (until now) but I challenged myself to a dry January. So no drinking alcohol whatsoever. Which has gotten me now thinking that I should just make this my normal way of life.
We never think about it this way, but alcohol is literally poison to our bodies. As tasty as your favorite beverage may be, it is doing nothing positive for your health. And dont even get me started on the whole “A glass of red wine a day has positive health benefits" bull crap. This is like saying that a little chocolate cake every day has health benefits. No, no it doesn’t, they both spike your insulin, make you retain fat, and slowly but surly damage your metabolic functioning until you get diabetes. And you can get anti-oxidants from like 80 other things that also dont also have poison in them. Its kinda like saying, “you get vitamin D from sunlight exposure, so I’m gonna stay outside shirtless all day long in the summer without sunscreen so I can make a ton of vitamin D!” Its not gonna work out very well for you.
Here's a quick article about it
And any studies about isolating the effects of food or drink are notoriously unreliable because of the sheer number of factors and variables at play. They are almost always intellectually disingenuous and oftentimes downright wrong. With enough data you can make anything say almost anything. But I digress………
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not being holier than thou and preaching down to you. I have always enjoyed adult beverages even to the point of alcoholism in my past. But Ive seen the physical damage done by booze in myself and clients enough times now that I feel that I need to not make it a normal part of my life anymore.
Ive seen enough clients not lose any fat from training because when asked what they did last weekend they respond by telling me about their days of parties and drinking. Then they wonder why the scale isnt moving………
If you wanna lean out much, much faster, then the booze has to go. Ive leaned out this month only from no booze. Now I’m not saying that I will never drink again, but I am saying that I’m going to save it for times of real celebration with my people, and not just drinking on a Friday night because I’m celebrating the weekend.
D #2: Daily Exercise
This one is short and sweet. My previous mindset to physical training was Go Hard or Go Home. I would lift weights 3-4x a week for several hours at a time, really killing myself and pushing hard. With age “wisdom” and a more full and busy life full of commitments I simply dont have the time (or desire) to train as long and as hard as I did before.
I do however want to stay swole and still able to intimidate my neighbors dogs (they are so annoying!) so I gotta train smarter not harder. A simple way to do this is to do less work but more often.
Until you walk funny!
You see, the biggest driver of hypertrophy (getting “toned” or “jacked”) is volume. Volume is the total amount of weight lifted during a session, or a week. So we can manipulate that in a number of ways.
We could either train 3x a week for like 2 hours like I used to before having kids and a life OR we can train more often but do fewer exercises each time. For example (and we are going to keep this super simple) say you do 9 exercises a day (3 sets each) 3x a week. That makes the total “volume” 81, and 27 per day. We can take that 81 and divide it by 5 lets say to make a daily volume of 16.2 which gives us a daily volume of 5.4.
So you could go from doing 3 sets each of 9 exercises 3 days a week to doing 3 sets of 5 exercises per day for 5 days a week and have the same total volume of work done. Therefore giving you the same results and taking less time each day.
D #3: Daily Gratitude
In 2020 I was straight up miserable. I was stressed because the pandemic had all but killed my business, I was working on remodeling our new-to-us house that needed a lot of work, and I wasn’t sleeping a lot because my 1 year old didn’t realize that sleep was great.
I did a lot of complaining both inwardly and outwardly and I blamed the world for my sorry state. This was also not an attractive look to friends, family, and clients who were all going through their own stuff and didn’t need my baggage on top of theirs.
Rather than focusing on what I could control and what I did have I was consumed by all the problems and stressors in my life. I had lost sight of what was truly important. I had a roof over my head, I could still (barely) pay my bills, my family was healthy AND we didn’t fall apart like so many other families were seemingly doing.
When I finally came around and started re-framing my way of thinking to seeing the blessings I did have rather than the struggles before me I felt so much lighter in my spirit. Better yet, with my newfound positive attitude it seemed to attract more people to me. My business came back around and I was able to help others with their struggles by creating a fun energy and atmosphere that was contrary to the state of the world at the time.
So this year I want to ensure that I dont lose focus of what I should be grateful for and maintain an attitude of abundance rather than scarcity.
Practically I’m going to do this by taking a little time as I drink my coffee each morning to reflect on what is good in my life and being thankful for that. Another practical approuch that my wife does each day is to keep a journal in which you record what you were grateful for each day. That way you can even look back upon the months and remind yourself about what is good, even if your life is difficult in that moment.
People are drawn to positivity. I refuse to turn people off by complaining this year. Although I will still share the occasional anti-Fed meme from time to time. Hey both parties are terrible OK!? Not complaining, this is a fact ;) LOL
I would love to hear how you are going to approuch 2022 differently. Lets build each other up this year!