On 1% of My Health...

As I stated in a recent post I've spent the past year or so building and running my company, while that journey is always a great one, I let a lot of things slide, my health being one of them. Before kicking off on this entrepreneurial endeavor I was working out four to five times a week. Most of my workouts were focused on getting stronger so they mostly consisted of lifting a lot of heavy things and capped off with a tad bit of cardio for good measure.

I actually really like heavy strength workouts, I like the feeling of being big, of being strong, I really enjoy smashing a large meal after a heavy workout. Maybe it's a mental block, but I feel that if I'm not lifting heavy or pushing myself in some strength increasing activity I am not getting better. As stupid as I know this sounds, it's a mindset I find myself struggling with.

So, I find myself at a crossroads. One of the things that let fall to the waist side while I was investing my time and energy to building a business was my regular exercise and eating habits. I'm still big, just not in any way that is strong or impressive. Luckily my most recent health check didn't show any impending issues, but I don't feel great and if I don't take action things are not going to get better.

As I've just started working out with any regularity again I'm finding that heavy lifting days are not as easy to recover from as they once were, and given that I am by no means getting any younger I think it's likely a good idea to incorporate a lot more cardio where I once had a lot more lifting. I am not sure where that is going to land me with regards to my workouts, I'm still trying to figure that out.

While researching some different workouts I came across an interesting post on a website that is part of Arnold Schwarzenegger's digital empire, written by John Romaniello.

To be honest, if something has Arnold Schwarzenegger involved I'm willing to give it a shot. One of the first books I ever got about exercising was His Encyclopedia of Bodybuilding, which was packed with amazing and useful info for anyone looking to get stronger.

The article itself was about bodyweight exercises, something I've long been interested in, and have in fact incorporated into my workouts for a long time, but mostly as a warmup.

However, it's not the bodyweight workouts I want to talk about in this post, I want to touch on the idea of what you can do with just 1% of your time each day. it's a very catchy idea and to be honest I'm a sucker for a system or framework.

As it turns out 1% of your day is just under 15 minutes. When I gave it some real thought I realized that I waste more time than that just about every day on things that don't benefit me at all. Since I read this I started looking at different parts of my day as 1% chunks and it has honestly made a big difference with regards to how I view my time.

Now If I am thinking of taking some extra time to work on something or to sidetrack I think about the percent of my time I am going to waste on it. I haven't fully flushed out all the way I am applying this framework to my daily life, but for now, I am making sure I spent at least 1% of my day exercising, some days as much as 4%.

I do have some specific goals for my health and fitness, but those are for me to know. They do all revolve around figuring out a way to be more active and have an overall healthier lifestyle.

I'll share more about my health and how I've explored the 1% framework in the future, I'm sure.

There Was a Time I Wrote a lot.

There was a time where I wrote a lot. I had multiple weekly columns in various papers or websites. I also contributed numerous stand-alone articles to websites and magazines every month. It was a ton of work, but also very gratifying.

That all started to slow down a few years ago. At the time I was focused on designing and planning a new media company I had the idea for. There always has to be trade-offs. As much as I enjoy writing and having my work published I was excited about the prospect of starting a new company and was willing to make that swap.

I didn't stop all at once, it was a gradual transition over a few months time. As I began to spend more time on the business plan and getting the pieces in place the number of writing gigs I took gradually fell off. 

These were tradeoffs I felt I had to make in order to put more time into designing and launching the new business, and they paid off. While I still spend a considerable amount of time building and running my media company I am at a point where I feel I can get back to writing a bit more.

And that is what I envision this blog will be, a chance to write about the things that tickle my mind at the moment. Most of what I write here will be opinion based and much of it will be fairly raw. But It's for my enjoyment, there won't be a schedule of when posts will drop or any reliable frequency. Just the musings of a random guy.

Well, I finally got this first post under my belt. Let's see what happens, shall we?