It won’t require body hack, or elixirs hocked on video download sites next to pop-up banner ads for Russian brides and penis enhancement pills.
It won’t require a cocktail of vitamins and super foods, like the kind Ray Kurtzweil subscribes to, in a effort to cheat death completely.
In fact, living longer, thinking clearer, and having more energy … is much simpler than all of that.
But first, let me share what I found out by using this app called MapMyRide:
MapMyRide tracks workouts for you on your phone, if you carry it with you while running or cycling. The GPS tracks route, distance, time, and speed. I started cycling to work more than 7 months ago, but have only starting using it in September.
In the 2 months tracked, I’ve spent:
- 16 hours on the bike
- Rode 180 miles
Which is like, crazy “whoa.”
After 7 months of bike commuting, I don’t think about it much anymore. It’s part of my routine, like brushing my teeth. I don’t think about how fast these numbers add up.
However, where riding has made the most difference isn’t in counting the number of miles I’ve churned beneath rubber and asphalt. It’s something more difficult to quantify:
- I arrive to work with a clearer, more refreshed mind than the effects of 3 cups of coffee.
- I get home after work and dodge that lethargic “fall-onto-the-couch” feeling.
- Regular exercised has markedly improved my clarity of thought and given me more consistent energy.
The Benefits of Regular Exercise
Do we really need to go over all the benefits of exercise?
Or is there enough info out there on the interwebs and splashed across magazine covers, from AARP to Lucky to Oprah?
Let’s keep it simple: making time for exercise is important. At a high-level, you’ll:
- Live longer
- Feel better about your self-image
- Feel healthier
- Have better sex
- Bring more clarity to work
- Have more energy
We could discuss dopamine and serotonin levels, and how regular exercise creates a caloric burning furnace in your cells, but really, do you care about the science?
Since most of us here work in entertainment, it’s 50/50 if we even passed chemistry.
Let’s break it down to caveman logic: Exercise = Good. Sitting on our asses all day = Bad.
If We Don’t Start Now, When Will There Be Time?
Our jobs ingrain the habit of chaining ourselves to the desk all day, answering phones and replying to email, fingers flying to react, react, react.
Fact is, we’re going to have a variety of jobs and roles throughout our career. This behavior will continue for a long time.
On the other hand, we’ve got one body and one mind. Employers change but those we’re stuck with. If we treat them like shit, neither will last very long.
Yet that’s what we do.
- We spend way too much time sedentary, not moving anywhere, not using our wonderful, beautiful bodies at all
- As an assistant, we eat a lot of meals at our desks, so we don’t even get up for lunch
- Then after work, we go drink, usually sitting down again
- In short, we’re spending an awful lot of time doing nothing except feeling our asses grow
Of course, assistants and people in Hollywood are aware of the benefits of exercise (“of course we know! We saw it on Buzzfeed!”)
It’s not even a question of desire — 95 percent of the people I talk to do want to exercise more.
The challenge is two fold:
- We don’t have the time
- Our busyness affects motivation (the opportunity cost feels too great)
But when is that ever going to change? If we don’t take the time now, why do we think we’d stumble upon more time in the future – when we have more responsibility in our careers and personal lives? Managing our time doesn’t get easier when you plug in loftier job titles and family, but more difficult.
The answer isn’t to put it off until you have more time, but to carve out time from what you already have.
If you don’t have the time today, what makes you think you’ll have it tomorrow?
How to Carve Out Time To Exercise
Here are ways to incorporate exercise into our already jam-packed schedules, in a way that keeps our motivation up:
1. Start ridiculously slow. How slow is “ridiculously” slow? These days I’m conservatively averaging 25 miles a week on the bike, but can you guess my first milestone towards this goal?
It was “start to look for a bike to buy.” That goal took an entire week.
The goal wasn’t “bike to work two weeks from now.”
It wasn’t even “buy a bike.”
All I did for the entire week was research the best way to find a bike, which I did by using boolean modifiers in a query string on Craigslist, then loading that search into an RSS feed.
The week after, the goal was, “make two offers on two different bikes,” then the week after, “go buy a bike.” I wanted to start so slow there was no way for me to miss my goal for the week.
Starting slow for another assistant may be noticing that hey, you haven’t bought a new pair of running shoes / workout shoes since high school P.E. The goal for the week could be: “go online and find a pair of shoes I like at a price I can afford.”
You don’t even need to click “buy” just yet — remember, we’re starting slow.
2. Start small. My first ride into work, I did on a Saturday. The objective? Make any unknown variables known: clocking the ride, learning the route, identifying how tired I was afterwards.
Starting slow is more about conquering emotional barriers than physical barriers.
Work gives us plenty to stress about: meetings that seem to grow legs and move all on their own, a never-ending stream of paperwork, finicky clients. All these little things take up cognitive energy (CE) — you know that lifeless, drained feeling you feel at the end of the day, when all you did was bang on a keyboard all day? That’s you, sucked dry of cognitive energy, sucka.
And the last thing I want to use my CE on is my commute, or my workout. Hence, why we start small.
If you’re not a cyclist, what might this look like for you?
Instead of swearing you’re going to run 2 miles when you get home, try walking for 20 minutes.
Instead of the banging out a circuit workout you found online, how about 20 push-ups?
A slow start is better than no start. It’s also better than the fast start that inevitably crashes and burns.
3. Take small steps forward. Keep every incremental step a small one. I didn’t go from hopping onto my bike for the first time to biking 80 miles in a week.
Aim for consistent small goals (e.g., in one month, increase cycling frequency from once a week to twice a week; increase 5 push-ups every week; add 3 minutes to your run) that you can succeed at.
It’s all about momentum, and momentum is something we create — it’s not bestowed upon us like fairy dust by a our Fairy MomentumMother.
4. Keep friction low. Friction is anything that slows us down in accomplishing our goals. So what prevents us from working out?
Personally, I had two major friction points: one, the nagging opportunity cost that there was something better I could be doing with my time, and two, picking out my outfit to change into when I got to work (um, yeah, seriously. Embarrassingly, this has kept me from working out in the morning.)
To reduce friction, I started blocking out the time period I wanted to work out in my calendar. This way, it felt like I reserved this time in advance for myself, and since I already plugged all my work in around this, I could let go of that feeling that there was something else I should be doing.
To reduce the friction from having to choose what to wear in the morning, I made sure to set aside my clothes every evening. So in the morning, I’d have no excuse not to ride to work.
5. Set a time. Block out time in your calendar, as I mentioned above. The key to this is combining it with #2: Start Small.
Don’t feel like you can devote a whole hour to a workout? How about scheduling yourself 20 minutes during lunch to walk around your building?
Or set an alarm to go off when you get home… before you’re ready to collapse onto your couch to start reading scripts, bust out those 20 push-ups you told yourself you’d do.
Whatever you decide, book it with yourself.
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Photo Credit: Studio Tempura
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