What's On Your Mind: Exercise Mindset & Routines

[00:00:00] Hey Justin, how are you? I'm doing well, Ram, how are you? Doing all right, happy Friday, you got a new hat and a new show I'm keeping track. I'm I'm diving into the, yeah, I'm diving into the closet and grabbing a new hat every one, see when I run out. I'm keeping track. I think we want to talk about exercise routines, and I'd love to get your take on, even prior to the routines themselves, how do you relate to exercise?

How do you approach that from a mindset perspective? Is it, hey, I know this is good for me, therefore I will do it? Is it, I'm going to feel good after I exercise? And therefore I do it, or how do you approach exercise? Yeah, very good question. I would say first, the pattern I saw from my father informs my approach to [00:01:00] exercise.

So my father was very fit, and I just always remember being impressed with how fit he was. And that left a mark. I have experienced different highs and lows with exercise. And what I've found is the most durable pull to consistently exercising is remembering that I feel really good after exercising. And when I go a few days even without exercising, I get down a little bit.

I just feel less energized. Not depressed per se, the edges of some type of funk start to set in and that is very consistent for me that if I take off a few days, it really becomes a challenge. That's right. And, if the funk becomes the baseline, that's also hard. You can't recognize.

That [00:02:00] you're in the funk. Um, so let's talk about routines then. So how do you approach it? Do you have a set schedule? Do you have a, yeah, you in the morning or what's the approach? So in terms of timing currently I'm first thing in the morning. I'm up at sometime between 4. 30 and 5 to work out.

Otherwise It doesn't get in to the day because the day gets away from me. Previously in my life, I was a midday workout. So pre COVID, when I was going into an office downtown years ago, I would work out and skip lunch. And just It's consume some kind of food quickly, but work out in the middle of the day.

And that worked best for me at the time. Now I couldn't imagine doing that again. So it's definitely middle of the day. Sometimes if I have the afternoon low of energy, sometime between two 30 and four, I might do something for 15 minutes just to get my blood flowing. So when you [00:03:00] have the dip in energy, that's a prompt for you to go exercise.

Yeah, I try to do maybe just some pull ups or maybe some push ups because I know the only thing that's going to get me through that is caffeine, a nap, or exercise. I can't do caffeine that late in the day because then my night is shot. I used to be able to just drink caffeine and then fall asleep, even more.

And I love a quick power nap, but sometimes that doesn't get you stronger as they say. Part of this goes back to. The approach to exercise, I believe a lot of people, I know I did in the past, I had a set of conditions that I would impose upon myself as requirements for exercise.

Oh, I feel like I've got energy. I feel like I'm well rested. Maybe I had the, I used to do this, I think it's a horrible thing of taking these Starbucks double shot espressos, 40 grams of sugar. I know that's not the right thing to do now. And I don't take any caffeine exercise, maybe afterward as a bit of a reward.

And so [00:04:00] I think my view is always a good time to exercise, maybe late at night not the best time, although I've done that at 9 PM and letting go of the mind's need to have the perfect set of conditions to exercise. is important because we will self deceive ourselves. Oh, you've been working hard.

You had a long day. You can do it tomorrow. Any reactions around that? Oh, I, those voices are always there and they're always very convincing and trying to tell you just do it later. You didn't get enough rest. Oh, you'll feel better tomorrow. Whatever the case may be, that inner monologue is often very convincing.

And you just got to shut it out. You can't listen to it. And that's the discipline of kind of just like getting up and going. And that's why I like it early in the morning, because if I get up that early, I'm not going to go do something else at 4 30 or 5 AM. I'm going to take my dogs out. I'm going to let them go to the [00:05:00] bathroom.

And then I roll straight into the workout. I found that it's for me to look at my phone before I start working out. I've in the past had a bad habit of kind of getting, my phone set for maybe listening to music or something else while I work out. But the first app I look at maybe is mail or slack or Instagram or Twitter.

And then I'm in a black hole for 15, 20 minutes and I'm like, wait a second. Now it's 540 in the morning. I got up early to work out and now I don't even have enough time to finish it before one of my kids gets up. So it's the discipline of saying I'm going to not going to do anything until I finish my workout.

I think that's the best move. That's the best practice that drives adherence. The blocker and exercise is, I believe by adherence and discipline, having those rules that you're conscious about and you're saying to yourself, I know you're a Jocko fan as well, and, [00:06:00] we talked about sometime before when you wake up, you don't hit snooze and you get right after it, and you have that internal spring built in, and every time you do that, you're reinforcing those neural pathways to respond the same way to those circumstances.

Yeah, I had that this morning, so I have three dogs, My youngest dog she's like crazy these days. Don't know what's going on with her. Topic for a separate day, unless I turn her into a running dog and then I start running with her for exercise, which I hate running. But she got up at 4. 30 and my alarm is set typically for 5.

Sometimes I'll naturally rise up early, but my alarm is set for 5. But when she got me up at 4. 30, I could have said, Oh, I'm just going to go back to sleep. And then I could have said at five, Oh, I didn't get a good night's sleep. I just got woken up and I'll work out tomorrow. But instead I just sat up good.

It's 4. 30. Let's go. I got an earlier start in the [00:07:00] day. The struggle is real. Let's go. Now, you also said the word good. Say some more. Did you actually say that to yourself? Was it I did. That's okay. Go ahead. Yeah, that's a nod to Jocko. That's a nod to the Jocko. Just good. It was not good. But in my mind, I said, Figure out how to take advantage of it.

And so I said, good. Now I've got 30 extra minutes in my morning that I didn't have otherwise, because the other side of my inner monologue was cursing my dog and thinking, why are you up at this time? You should be sleeping. Why are you such a crazy dog? I've got an Australian shepherd that has more energy than my golden, or has less energy than my golden retriever.

Why? But I didn't let myself get there. So credit to Jocko for. Teaching me that and for a blind man, he says, when you wake up, say good, or no, he just said anything bad. Good. Oh, I love that. He'll learn from it. He'll just find the learning from it. So for instance, [00:08:00] I, earlier when I said the, sometimes I get sucked into Instagram, I used to beat myself up about that, but then I took the approach, no, good.

I learned something. Now I can't use Instagram before. I wouldn't have known that if I hadn't fallen into that black hole. Now I know. Now I know I can't touch that. That's powerful. That's powerful. Like 80 percent of exercise is mindset. It's true for life too. It's mindset. Yes. And finding meaning in suffering is important.

And that's fundamentally what that does. Is what you're getting at and gratitude and having gratitude, state of mind, which is also . Yes. I have a few quotes on my whiteboard that's down in my gym. First of all, I call it the pain cave. It's not really cave, but I call it that. And I'd say two of them are the most.

Important. I say consistency over intensity. Yes, because I used to have times [00:09:00] where I would like really push myself hard and then I would need a lot of time to recover. And I realized that then led to fits and starts and maybe injuries. And, Oh, I wanted to, have an ego lift and put too much weight on the bar because I thought, Oh, this would be really cool if I can lift that much weight.

And then I got hurt or then I was too sore to work out. So Consistency over intensity. And then the other is a Kobe Bryant quote. Wasn't ever a huge fan, actually, of Kobe as a player. But later, the more I learned about his approach to life and training, I become a huge Kobe fan. And he, I believe he said this when he was recovering from a really serious injury towards the end of his career.

Maybe it was a torn Achilles something very significant later in his career. And he was recovering. And, he didn't want to get up at the time he had to get up to do all of the things he had to do to get back to the court. And he said something along the lines of, I've [00:10:00] already made the contracts with myself.

I signed it. I'm not negotiating with myself. And that's the way I think about that mind is trying to negotiate with itself to say, I used to do it today. You can do it tomorrow. And so don't negotiate with yourself. You've already made the contract. Fulfill it. Absolutely. And that speaks to leading oneself and personal responsibility.

That's easier said than done. When you wake up in the morning, it's hard to summon that intellectual idea of not breaking covenants with yourself. You actually say Kobe said this one day, and they're probably going to get out of bed. Or is that? That's why. Yeah. That's why it's written on the whiteboard.

So I see it every time I get down to the gym. So that's right. So you have visual cues which are prompting you. Look, friends of mine, they grew up fanboys of Michael Jordan. They'd have posters of Michael Jordan and Michael Jordan has had his [00:11:00] own. Idols too, which she admired, about motivating him to do 10, 000 free throw shots, et cetera.

So I think finding that inspiration around you and creating prompts around you. And sometimes that might be something on the wall, but it also could be a friend that holds you accountable. My cousin is a fitness fanatic. I know when I go visit him, we're always working out. As I'm driving down, I'm like, all right, we're going to do these three exercise routines on these three days.

My mind is already geared up. For when I wake up. All right. Yeah, I know he's going to come by at this time. We're going to work out. And you can be deliberate about structuring those cues in your life to focus you on exercise. Yeah, I would say that the motivating factor of, Looking up to people or having a community around you, that's actually probably the hardest thing I've been struggling with on a personal level because I stopped after the pandemic going to a CrossFit or a gym or anything like that and I'm [00:12:00] fortunate enough to have The ability to build out a gym in my basement.

So there's no whoa, is me here. However, I, you have to motivate yourself every time and you're alone every time you work out, which it's a challenge. So that's where I've developed these, shortcuts, if you will, or hacks to keep myself motivated. And I have to change up routines every once in a while too, because otherwise it gets too boring.

Let's go there in terms of a consistency. And I agree. And it's hard when you have a family, right? In my twenties and young thirties, I lived in apartment building and the gym was on the rooftop and there was no excuse and it was accessible and making your lifestyle decision around proximity to fitness is very important.

The best shape I ever had in my life was when I was required to bike to the train because it was fast with any other mode of transportation. And we're always trying to squeeze an extra eight minutes out of life. So sports committed [00:13:00] every day to exercise because I want to spend more time with my daughter or whatever it might be.

And here I am, I got to exercise. So those choices matter where you live to set yourself up to go downhill and have momentum in your direction. But on consistency of exercise, and I agree variation matters, how what are your variations of work? I would say, you're in a funk, like you, I just got to be consistent.

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