I think there is a mistaken notion that exercise is just this thing we subject our physical body to. That’s the way we treat it, anyway. There’s a reason why health clubs position TVs in front of treadmills—to relieve the mental burden of exercise.

This isn’t just about focusing your mind on your physical exercise though. This is about doing things specifically for the mind. It’s about mental training.

I’ve written about mental training before in Exercise is not just physical, but now I want to link off somewhere else. This comes from Ellen Weber’s Brain Leaders and Learners blog: 25 Ways to Reboot Brainpower & Add Innovation.

I think you’ll find some useful and beneficial recommendations in that list.

In Bruce Lee’s Tao of Jeet Kune Do he lists four things you can do everyday to get some exercise.

• Take a walk whenever you can—like parking the car a few blocks away from your destination.
• Avoid taking the elevator; climb the stairs instead.
• Cultivate your quiet awareness by imagining an opponent attacking you—while you are sitting, standing, or lying down, etc.—and counter that attack with various moves. Simple moves are the best.
• Practice your balance by standing on one foot to put your clothes or shoes on—or simply stand on one foot whenever you choose.

So, there you have it. No excuses.

A good kind of training momentum is when you train consistently, day after day, month after month, year after year. A bad kind of training momentum is when you do your exercises too fast.

Doing your exercises too fast means that in certain portions of the movement, the muscles are only steering and guiding, rather than actually lifting weight. For example, if I do a squat and come up really quickly, there are entire angles of the movement where my leg muscles aren’t lifting any weight at all.

To kill your exercise momentum, slow your rep speed down. Take two seconds to lift the weight and three seconds to lower it. Focus on the muscles you’re working out rather than blindly going through the motions.

You’ll notice a huge difference in terms of how strong you feel and how much muscle control you have. Fast reps are often sloppy reps.

Of course, there are situations where you are doing fast reps for a particular reason, within the context of sport-specific training. That’s different.

In Rock, Iron, Steel: The Book of Strength, Steve Justa dedicates a whole chapter to isometrics. You never really hear anyone talk about isometrics. Have you ever seen anyone do isometrics? Have you ever done them?

I remember seeing pictures of Bruce Lee training isometrically. He was a real fan of isometric exercise. After doing Steve Justa’s program, and experiencing what isometrics can do, I suspect that isometrics were a huge contributor to Bruce Lee’s strength.

Steve Justa takes isometrics to a whole different level. His program consists of four days of isometric training, two days off, and then sprints on the seventh day. In the program, you vary how long you hold the tension for, how quickly you turn the tension on for, and what percentage of effort you use to hold the tension.

And then, there’s that seventh day when you do 30 sets of quarter block sprints, rest six hours, and then do a two mile run. I was sore for days after that one.

Steve Justa describes how he felt when doing the isometrics:

The isometrics made me feel like a steel shaft. They burned the fat right out of the muscle from the inside out. They made my muscle super dense and super efficient. They gave me super-speedy quick movements. They made me feel light as a feather afoot. They gave me great endurance.

Isometrics let you train at any conceivable angle, using any possible device. You can walk up to a corner in a building and pretend like you’re trying to press it apart. What a weird angle of strength. You can walk up to two poles and try to pull them apart. You can get under your car and try to press it off of you. Or, you can just press your fingers against your thumbs individually.

Isometrics give you tremendous body control. The best way to say it is when you want it, it’s there, and without effort. When I was doing the isometric program, I always felt ready.

One exercise in the program is doing a squat where you try to lift the weight 100 times, in half-second bursts, in sets of five, using 90% power. You learn to turn your muscles on and off very quickly. The real trick of that one is when you stop pressing against the weight, you’re still holding yourself up against gravity. When you relax and stop pressing against the weight, you still have to maintain tension against the bar so you can be ready for the next rep. You learn some serious control.

Doing the program in his book, you’ll most likely feel stronger than you ever have before.

Isometrics are good for anyone at any age. You don’t have to do them as intensely as Steve Justa’s program, but when you do them you have to be detailed. Think about all the angles you want to work out, think how long you want to hold the contractions, and don’t do it more than 4 days per week.

While you’re doing them, make sure to practice any sporting movements (if you have a sport) while you’re doing the isometrics. Isometrics teach to use more of your muscles. If you don’t practice your sport while you’re doing them, and then six weeks into the program you decide to play your sport, you’ll swing/throw/punch with more power than before and you’re likely to hurt yourself.

I remember one morning back in 2002. Sitting in my cube, enjoying one of the perks of my new office job–free soda–I found myself disgusted that over the course of the morning I had consumed six Mountain Dews.

Six Dews a day was not unusual for me at that time. That’s an additional 1,020 calories per day in liquid. In 2010, that’d be almost 3 million additional calories in my diet had I continued that pace.

Fortunately, I stopped drinking soda shortly after that moment of disgust when I found six empty cans of Mountain Dew in my wastebasket.

What small changes can you be making right now that eight years down the road will make a big difference?

I was just cruising around on Steve Maxwell’s website and came across a program that makes a great daily regimen. Parts of it remind me of Hackenschmidt’s routine which I still do everyday, although I don’t do the entire routine.

Anyway, over at Steve’s site, you’ll find some nice descriptions and decent pictures for a great routine to get your started off on the right foot.

Everything I learned about life, I learned through martial arts. I’m paraphrasing what Bruce Lee said about the martial arts.

I feel the same way about exercise.

I first start exercising in 1994 when I lived in Tennessee. I’ve been doing it ever since. When you do something consistently for that long, it becomes the way through which you view the world.

For 16 years, my life has centered around physical culture in one form or the other. The way my body feels serves as a marker for the years.

Body for Life, Bill Pearl, Bruce Lee, Pavel Tsatsouline, Steve Cotter, Mike Mahler, Steve Maxwell, Tudor Bompa, Health for Life, GH1000 (the workout and the supplement). Creatine, Yohimbe Bark, protein powders, recovery shakes, DHEA, Animal Pak, amino acids, desiccated liver, crazy shakes with raw eggs. Under Armour, sweatpants, wife beaters, athletic supporters, wick away technology and even cotton. And too many different exercises to try to recall.

Over the years you try and learn about a lot of different stuff.

I’ve also been a writer for all that time so I have 15 years of different writings on the whole thing. And a lifetime collection of photos.

Of course, some events stick out over the years. Good things, like the one arm pull up. Bad things like the torn pec.

The torn pec happened when I was bench pressing. Right after I got the weight off the supporters, this flash of intuition hit me: “You probably shouldn’t do this.” Foolishly, I ignored it. When I felt the searing pain in my chest, I yelled “Ow you fucker!” because I thought one of the kids in the weight room had grabbed my pec. Then I realized no one was there, except the spotter. He said he saw my pec ball up underneath my shirt and that it looked crazy.

After thinking about that feeling, that intuition, I realized I had had it before. I clearly remember that feeling before I punched the 10 foot wide, 2 inch thick board that my grandmother said was rotten. It was a little voice that said, “You probably shouldn’t do this…”

Note that I'm wearing a Mortal Kombat T-shirt

I wish I could have stopped myself when intuition spoke. Sometimes you listen to that voice and sometimes you don’t.

For some of the injuries, I know that the things I was doing in my life created the reason for the injury. When I was drinking a gallon of milk per day, I shouldn’t have tested my max bench press.

I’ll probably have to live with the fact that my max bench is 245 and not 250 (which ruptured my pec) for the rest of my life. But who knows. Trying to join the 300 club might be my midlife crisis.

There’s an interesting thing about the aging process. Some of the things that decline are things that you have to work on. Like posture. And breathing. Those fundamental things. So it’s not necessarily an aging thing, it’s a training thing.

Posture makes a huge difference. Huge. In your breathing. In your confidence. In whether or not you will have pain in your body. On whether or not you will get injured.

I find it ironic that some of the most fundamental things don’t get any attention. Don’t get me wrong, chiseled pecs are cool. But, so is breathing, and you use your breathing a lot more than you use your pecs.

How well you age depends a great deal on how well you treat your body. And how well you feel depends a great deal on how well you age.

Training is something you can do to change your whole experience of your physical life. Even your mental life. It’s a pretty amazing thing that you can do something, and your body changes its physical structure to get better at doing that thing. And that happens because you take in food. Even if it’s just M & Ms.

The physical changes that we can accomplish in our body by doing certain things, are much like the changes that can be accomplished in your household, in your family, in your community, in your city, county, state, country, ad infinitum, in both directions. The universe? Neutrinos?

When I was getting injured, I started figuring out the things that were causing the injuries, and then using different systems. It’s easy when you’re changing your own composition to influence changes. But when you’re dealing with a much larger system, making changes is more difficult.

I feel there is a definite, and welcome, end to the current way in which humans are living. I think that the last few centuries have been great, actually. I don’t know why all programs about the future seem negative. Whether we’re getting dumber in Idiocracy or being killed at the hands of machines in Terminator.

Living now is much better than living when you had to search for water. Going to a supermarket is infinitely better than killing your own food. Or growing it. I’m also a fan of warm water and electricity.

And driving around in a car ain’t bad, but someday I hope we figure out teleportation.

But, it seems we can’t handle these things without trashing our planet.

So, I’m designing an exercise program for earth. It starts with more breathing. We need to learn to relax. Add to that better posture—we need to look one another in the eye and stop trying to screw each other over. A little more cooperation and less competition.

The reason we’re obsessed with work is that we don’t know what to do with our free time. So we need to breath and learn to relax and realize that it—whatever ‘it’ is—just isn’t as important as we think it is, and there are more important things to focus on.

A good reminder, to help us focus on what really matters is neatly encapsulated in this poem-esque thing we found in one of my grandma’s books:

Instead of watching
   folks go by,
Turn on your self
   the critic eye.
Just watch the things
   you daily do;
Put in your time
   just watching you.
To do the job and do
   it right,
It almost takes us
   day and night;
No doubt, my friends
   the thing to do,
Is me watch me, and
   you watch you.

Yesterday, while advancing to second on sacrifice fly in a softball game, I took a glove to the face. Today, I have a laceration on my nose and a cut on my lip. I feel great!

Our culture has forgotten about the body. You could argue that we’ve even forgotten about the world! We live so much of our lives in this virtual world and can easily be so distracted by the virtual world that we forget about the real world that we inhabit.

So, while I’m a little sore from previous workouts, from softball, and from getting tagged in the face, I’m called back to the real, physical world. The world that is beautiful. The world that is increasingly an indoor world, whose outdoors is only enjoyed in trips between the car and a building.

I’ve read somewhere—who knows where—that something to strive for is to do something you’re not sure you can each day.

It’s a worthy ideal. Life, after all, originally started as a struggle for survival. It’s in our genetic makeup. That’s why we don’t do so well when things are handed out for free. It’s depressing; and it goes against some of our core circuitry. That depressing feeling of going against our core circuitry is not something that changes in a generation or two. Evolution requires time beyond the scope of human intellect.

So there’s something elemental about challenging yourself, doing something you didn’t know you could do. This is where the distinction between exercise / working out and training comes into play. Exercising and working out are maintenance activities, they just get you active and get in decent shape.

There is nothing wrong with exercising and working out. They’re great, in fact. But this is a reminder to myself and anyone who is reading that sometimes you need to train. Training is when you exercise so hard that you’re really not sure if you’re up to it. Training is where you get butterflies before the workout because you’re kinda scared.

Being kinda scared is good, it means you’re growing. That goes back to the ideal expressed in the beginning—challenge yourself each day. Ideals, by definition, aren’t possible. But remembering to challenge yourself from time to time will make you a better man. Or woman.

Sometimes, you have to look like this after a workout.

I’ve written a lot of different things about what I want workingmanfitness.com to be and who was the target. For awhile, I thought about a man in his 40′s or 50′s, in relatively good shape, but wanting to retain those elements of youth–strength, endurance, energy, quality movement, etc.

I also thought of the bare minimum a man needed. You know, specificity for life. An average life. An average life an office worker.

I sit practically all day long. I work with information on a screen. I talk with people to learn more about the information and make plans, and I sit when I talk with them, too.

That’s why I wrote that sometimes the greatest office worker strain comes when you put an h into one of your sits.

Today, I helped my brother move. I’ve taken off from much of training except for an almost daily Hackenshmidt routine that I’m supposed to write about one of these days. I also strained my oblique so that prevented me from lifting my coveted kettlebells.

I was able to move everything I wanted to, without issue. I could have done some things without help a few years ago. But I was able to do everything I wanted (with my dad and brother helping) without pain, without getting overly tired, and even in 90 degree muggy weather.

That’s what I think of when I think of fitness. Being able to do stuff like that. And sometimes I think, for an office worker, who has no desire to workout, what is the absolute minimum you would have to do?

I’ve been putting myself through that, a little bit. It’s tough to watch some muscle weight disappear. I’ve lost 15 pounds overall. On a 185 frame, that’s fairly significant.

Many people think fitness has to be so intense and burdensome, but I’ve spending 15 minutes 6 days a week doing these Hackenschmidt exercises I feel good. I have good body control from balancing work, good overall strength through specific leg exercises and really slow push ups. It’s helped with my posture, too. I’m important thing for a laptop sloucher like me.

I’d like to put together a manual of the bare minimum program that an office worker needs. I wonder if office workers who don’t work out would be able to devote the 15 or so minutes everyday?