Category: Skill Building - An Athlete's Mind

The Myth of 10,000 Steps

8/14/2017

The only person you should compare yourself to is the person that you were yesterday.

-Amy Morin

How many steps does it take to be healthy? To increase physical activity? To change yourself for the better?

If you have a fitness tracker, you’re probably saying, “well, 10,00 steps.” After all, you spend your days stressing about reaching that magic number. You take a lunch walk at work. You park further away at the grocery store. You pace in your room before bed to get those last 100 steps.

The 10,000 steps goal is based on the CDC’s recommendation of 150 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic activity per week. While that’s a great goal to set for the population, it’s like trying to use a hammer to drive in a pin. Yeah, it’ll work, but it’s far from the best tool for the job. It's the "2,000 calorie diet" of lifestyle activity.

The point is this: there is no magic number. It’s a very personal thing, and should be individualized as such. Trying to apply a one-size-fits-all approach can be far too hard for some, and far too easy for others. But there is a simple solution, and one that has been overlooked by the technology today.

Do more.

So simple it seems ridiculous, right? The goal—if you want to get healthier, walk more, to become more active—is to do more than you have been doing. It’s an elegant solution to an inherent goal-setting issue in fitness technology. Being active isn’t an all-or-nothing game. It’s about making small changes and building on those changes. Even a couple hundred steps at a time.

Make Your Exercise Work for You: The Upward Spiral of Affect

6/20/2016

How can you ensure you get the most out of your workout, while also increasing the likelihood you go back the next day? Easy. Think about how awesome you're going to feel after. It's called "Post-Exercise Affective Expectation," but it's a lot easier than it sounds.

My Fitness Tech Use: A Case Study

3/25/2016

“Be better today than you were yesterday. Be better tomorrow than you are today.”
– Jim Harbaugh

I'm a huge believer in the Quantified Self. The more information we have about our exercise, sleep, nutrition, and how we feel, the better we are able to learn how these things interact. Fitness technology has allowed us to track all of these things, but fail to tell us what to do with them. Below is a case study regarding how I use my experience in exercise psychology to apply the information received from this technology.

The Most Useful Skill: A Champion's Mindset

9/10/2015

Watch your thoughts for they become words,
watch your words for they become actions,
watch your actions, for they become habits,
watch your habits for they become your character,
watch your character for it becomes your destiny.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

The next "skill" I'm going to discuss isn't so much a skill as it is a mindset. An approach to life. Like most things, this doesn't apply just to sports, but facet of life. In my experience, this is the greatest predictor of success there is. It's what sets the best apart from the rest. It's what drives the constant need for improvement-- that push to become the best you can be. It's what we call "The Champion's Mindset."

Building Confidence: Fake it 'til you make it

8/28/2015

TO BE A GREAT CHAMPION YOU MUST BELIEVE YOU ARE THE BEST. IF YOU'RE NOT, PRETEND YOU ARE.
-MUHAMMAD ALI

Last week, we talked about confidence, why it's important, and sources of confidence. Today, I tell you an easy trick to increase your confidence. The easiest way to become more confident is to pretend that you are confident. While I use the term "fake it" in reality it's not fake. It may seem that way starting out, but soon the changes to our confidence are real, and easily achieved.

Improving Your Exercise: Activity Trackers and Anchoring

8/23/2015

Do you ever have those days where you just don't feel like exercising? Those days where getting off the couch, or out of bed early, just seems like too much work? You just feel "blah", and even if you did exercise, it probably wouldn't be productive? In this post I'm going to show you how we can utilize a specific cue (i.e. our activity tracker) to elicit positive emotions and confidence, and help you perform to your peak ability and overcome difficulties you may encounter when maintaining exercise.

Goal Setting: Activity Trackers and Effective Goals

8/9/2015

Setting goals is the first step in turning the invisible into the visible.
-Tony Robbins

By now, hopefully you’ve read my posts on setting effective goals.

Now, I want to take a moment and discuss how goal-setting relates to activity trackers. Do you have a Fitbit, Jawbone UP, Misfit Shine, or anything similar? Does it tell you that you have to walk 10,000 steps to reach your goal today? Based on everything we learned about setting effective goals, does that seem like a quality goal you should be setting? For the sake of this post, keep in mind the example we came up with the other day.

We have our outcome goal, which is the destination:

Outcome: I will run the local 5k on January 1st in under 30 minutes.

And we have process goals, which provide us the road map of how to get there.

Process: I will limit my junk food consumption to once a week on Saturday evenings.

I will eat more calories than my daily expenditure to aid recovery and training.

Goal setting: Process Goals-- Our Road map to Success

8/5/2015

a gOAL WITHOUT A PLAN IS JUST A WISH.
-Antoine de Saint-Exupery

So, last time, we came up with our outcome goal, the ultimate goal we want to achieve. How do we achieve that goal? An effective goal won’t just tell us where we want to go, but how we get there. Just like you wouldn’t set off on a cross-country road trip without a map (or GPS, for the younger generation), you shouldn’t try to make a change to yourself without understanding how, and what it takes, to get there. Process goals act as that road map to tell us how we achieve our ultimate Outcome goal.

Goal setting: Outcome Goals--Determining our Destination

8/3/2015

If you don't know where you are going,
you'll end up someplace else.
-Yogi Berra

So you want to make a change. How do you know where you want to go?

Goals are the fundamental building block of change and self-improvement. As everyone knows, goals tell us where we want to go. It’s the light at the end of the tunnel. Whether it’s running a mile or a marathon, setting a goal provides us with a clearly defined thing that we want to achieve. Everyone has some goal they would like to achieve. Let me help you realize your goal.