Archive for ‘Physical Performance’

June 1st, 2010

10 Ways you can Improve your Life Today!

I’ve posted a couple of list-type entries these past few days, and I promise this will be the last one for a while. I’ve got a number of other entries planned, but I wanted to get this one out of the way. In many ways, this is one of the more integral entries that I’ll ever post on this blog, as it ties into the grand theme of the blog in so many ways. This being a self-help blog, most entries mention how you can improve yourself in specific areas. Today I want to look at ten things you can do to improve your overall state of mind, health and enjoyment.

Lists like these are always difficult to write. Sometimes you need to artificially inflate them to include exactly the number of items you were gunning for; sometimes you need to shorten the list down. This time around, it was definitely the second alternative. I could have made this list 20, 30, 40 or even 50 items long, but I decided to go for what I consider to be the ten most important ones.

1. Improve your existing skills! I cannot explain often enough how important this one is. We all have some skills; things that make us who we are. We may be good at writing, singing, playing an instrument, speaking foreign languages, speaking in front of audiences, dancing or mediating. However, there is almost always room for improvement in all of these areas. Take the time to analyze what skill set you are using on a daily basis and see where there is room for improvement.

You may, for example, enjoy playing music on your MIDI keyboard in the evenings. Why not start studying some more musical theory to improve this skill? Why not set yourself the task of writing a short story (say, for example, 5,000 to 10,000 words) every week? I’m sure your skills will improve dramatically – and faster than you expected!

2. Stretch the limits of comfort! Most of us live in a far smaller bubble than we’re capable of. We tend to gravitate towards the same meals during lunch at the office, we take the same route when we go out jogging or walking the dog, we buy similar clothing and we go to the same clubs and pubs during the week-ends. Why not challenge yourself? Try something new? Go to a restaurant where you’ve never eaten and order something that you’ve never had! Try going to a random night club with a friend – or even all by yourself! Some of the best experiences in your life will have come from times where you actively went out of your way to do something you’ve never done before; why not make a habit of this?

3. Challenge yourself! Sometimes, you need to grab hold of yourself and really force yourself to make changes in your life. Say you’ve decided that you’re going to quit smoking, go on a diet or start a healthy exercise routine. Set yourself the challenge of doing said thing for four weeks – 28 days – and have a clearly defined penalty for what you will have to do if you fail. It could be, for example, that you have to donate $100 to a specific charity, treat your closest friends to dinner at a fancy restaurant or something similar. Make sure that the penalty is big enough to motivate you. If you decide, after the 28 days, that this new habit isn’t for you, then you’re free to stop, but make sure that you definitely stick with it for these 28 days. After all, what’s 28 days in the grand scheme of things? You can avoid eating fast food for 28 days, can’t you? … right?

4. Study the people who inspire you! There are many people in life that we can look up to in one way or another. I could easilly list a number of authors, martial artists, personal development coaches, psychologists, philosophers and mucisians who have traits, skills or abilities that I admire. In some way, I want to have those particular skills, but maybe not the rest of what makes that person who he is. What better to do than to study that trait in that person? What is it he does that makes him such a great martial artist, for example? Is it the amount of hours a week that he trains? Is it the general philosophy that he has towards his art? Is it the art itself that is superior? By studying a person and his traits in this way, you may find out what has been holding you back from growing and developing in that area.

5. Design your future self! This one is often brought up in personal development circles. If you’re improving yourself, you must have some sort of notion about what goals you have, right? Why not clearly define them? Write down what sort of person you want to be, what type of life you want to be leading and everything that is related to it. Pick a point in the future, say five or ten years down the line, and write a short description of who you are at this point. Then step back for a moment and look at how you differ from the person you’ve described. Maybe this will help you recognize what actions you need to take to get where you want to be.

6. Read more books! One of the greatest pleasures in life comes from indulging yourself in a great story. Also, one of the best ways to learn a new subject is to read what other people have written about the subject. Avoid pulp literature and the cheap dime-a-dozen crime dramas that hardly bring anything more to your life than insomniac page-turner evenings – unless, of course, you feel like taking a break from more ‘difficult’ literature for a while. Read the classics in various fields, but always try to mix up your reading to avoid becoming bogged down in a specific area. Jump between Goete, Dante, Freud, Dostoyevsky, Shakespeare, Tolkien, Hume, Chauser, Jung, Austen, Dumas, Nietzche, Wilde, Locke, Voltaire and Kafka.

7. Learn a new skill! I’m sure there’s something you’ve decided you’d like to learn, so why not actually go out and learn it? Whether it be a new language, juggling or knitting, a new skill adds to your identity and makes you understand the world better.

8. Find your flaws and acknowledge them! We’ve all got flaws, no matter how high and mighy we might think ourselves to be. See if you can’t figure out what flaws you have – ask your friends to be brutally honest to you if you can’t think of any for yourself. Don’t try to defend yourself with explanations or excuses, just accept that this is who you are and that only real hard work will change this part of you. It will be difficult and you will try to reject these things, but only through acceptance can we truly grow.

9. Keep a diary, blog or journal! It can be very interesting to go back and read the thoughts, interests, habits, hobbies and friends we kept a few years ago. Looking back at my own life, I sometimes feel like I cannot even recognize the person I was as little as five years ago. Seeing this sort of growth and development can be a huge motivation, but the journal has another very important function. When you re-read the story of your life, you may be able to see habits or behaviors that you were previously unaware of. In the heat of the moment, you reacted in a specific way without ever considering that this is a pattern that you’ve fallen into many times before. Maybe it’s time to change?

10. Most importantly – don’t stress things! Sometimes, the very best thing we can do to ourselves is to set all of this growth, development, personal enhancement and excellense nonsense aside and sit in the sun for a few hours with a good mindless book. We could throw a frisbee with friends down at the beach, throw a tennis ball for the dog to fetch a few hundred times or just invite friends over for an Indiana Jones movie marathon. While growth and constant development are important to us all – you wouldn’t be reading this post if it wasn’t! – it’s just as important to just take a break and relax every now and again.

Treat yourself to it. You deserve it.

May 27th, 2010

Five Golden Rules of Thumb

Almost every day, you end up in situations where you need to make decisions, do something special or plan your schedule. For most people, this is not very difficult, but even the experts end up in situations where they feel uncomfortable. I’d like to cover five golden rules that have served me very well in various situations.

  1. Always assume you will succeed in whatever it is that you’re doing. This is far easier said than done, but it pays off. If you’re expecting failure, you will set yourself up for failure. Even things that seem so outlandishly difficult that you’re almost guaranteed to fail; ignore it and assume that you’re going to succeed anyway. It will mentally prepare you for it and will allow your mind to focus far better on your task.
  2. If you can’t solve a problem, change the rules. This doesn’t work in all situations, but you’d be surprised how often it does work. If what you’re doing isn’t giving you the results that you want, you can assume that there is a better way of doing it. See if you can’t change the rules.
  3. Don’t try to explain to yourself why you do (or do not do) things. This one is extremely important. If you’re, for example, having difficulties with your ambition to stop smoking, don’t lie to yourself and say that “But I’m so stressed right now; I’ll quit after this hectic period”. Don’t try to invent explanations for yourself just to avoid losing your self-respect or something similar. At the very best, you’re only lying to yourself. At worst, you’re creating a barrier to self-knowledge and insight into how you really work. Honesty is always good, but honesty towards yourself is essential.
  4. If you cannot change a bad situation, stop worrying about it. Too many times we worry about things we cannot change or which are otherwise out of our control. We waste energy and countless hours of our lives just worrying about things for nothing. It’s never bad to plan ahead, but building up images of worst-case scenarios doesn’t help anybody.
  5. If you want something done, do it yourself. While other people might be better at doing it, do it faster or have more experience; the best thing is to do things yourself. You will build self-esteem, possibly gain a new skill set and grow in the eyes of others. Naturally, try not to do too much; after all, we all need other people in our lives to help us out.

While these rules are anything but simple, try to think about them every now and again. You’d be surprised how much easier they make your life.

May 21st, 2010

Straightening Up

Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No-Derivative-Works (2.0) image from ostrosky's photostreamIt turns out your mother was right; good posture is important! We’ve all heard it; our parents admonishing us to “sit up straight!”. They would give us millions of tiny tips and tricks for what the best way to do it is. Hold your stomach in, push your shoulders back, imagine the back of your head is being pulled up by a wire, relax your shoulders, etc. But why is it that we want a good posture, what does it do for us? Also, most importantly, is there anything we can do to get there?

(Image: Beach yoga in Patagonia, a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No-Derivative-Works (2.0) image from ostrosky’s photostream)

Most of my entries lately have been about purely mental things; our attitudes towards life and the way that we think about things. Today, however, I’d like to talk about how important a good posture is and why we should do our best to improve upon it.

First of all, we can’t ignore the obvious improvement that good posture does to the way that you present yourself to the world. People with good posture look thinner, taller and more confident; I think these are all desirable traits to most people. Secondly, the internal health reasons are very important as well. By slouching or assuming bad posture when sitting, standing and/or walking, we are causing unnecessary strain to our muscles, joints, ligaments, bones and organs. This can cause them to wear down or weaken and will eventually leads to injury. Lower back pain, something that a considerable portion of adults today suffer from to some degree, can very often be linked to incorrect posture. As if that wasn’t enough, bodily systems like digestion, elimination and breathing are affected.

So how do we do it? What can we keep in mind if we want to get a good posture? Are there any exercises, mental tricks or even tools that you can use to get better posture?

Of course there are.

We can divide the things you can do into three separate areas; flexibility, awareness and strength. I’ll cover them individually.

Flexibility has to do with creating better mobility in various places in your body. In the blog Mark’s Daily Apple, there are three excellent write-ups about improving thoracic spine mobility, hip mobility, and shoulder mobility and scapular stability. There are plenty of exercises with great video examples included in these three posts and I would definitely recommend that you examine them well. Most require no tools or exercise machines beyond a tennis ball or two.

Awareness has to do with reminding yourself often enough not to slouch that it becomes automatic. In many ways, this is the hardest part. When sitting by a computer, it becomes so easy to begin to lean towards the screen. We spend more and more time sitting down; being the most seated generation in all of human history. Since our heads are so heavy (roughly 15 lbs), our spine has to support them well. By thrusting our heads forward, we have to use a couple of muscles to support them instead. We also injure ourselves through bad sleep support, stress, careless habits, weak or imbalanced muscles, improper shoes, obesity and bad work spaces. Keeping a few things in mind will help us here. For example, try sitting all the way back in a straight-backed chair. If you want/have to, place a small pillow in the small of your back, where it arches in slightly. While walking, try to hold your head raised high, chin forward, shoulders back, chest out, and stomach tucked in. Keep your weight on the balls of your feet, not your heels. Keep your head level, not pushed forward.

Strength is the least important of the three factors, but cannot be ignored. Many people want to build nice stomach or chest muscles, but forget that they need to balance these muscles with back/shoulder muscles. Imbalance in the muscular build-up will cause imbalance in your posture.

A simple test to see if you need to improve your posture is the mirror test. Stand in front of a full-length mirror with your eyes closed and stand as straight as you can. Then open your eyes, look in the mirror and double-check to ensure that:

  1. Your shoulders are level.
  2. Your head is straight.
  3. The spaces between your arms and sides seem equal.
  4. Your kneecaps face straight ahead.
  5. Your ankles are straight.

If not, you should definitely start working on improving your posture; there is some great benefit in this for you.