Lies I Tell Myself - Part 1

I think this might end up becoming a regular series. It's very useful to me, and may be useful to someone else. There's also quite a lot of these that need examining, so there's plenty to write.

I'd like to examine something that I tell myself that I don't think is actually true. It's something along the lines of, 'I require a certain number of hours of low quality leisure time on the internet each evening in order to properly unwind.'

There's some implications that come with that statement that are worth noting. Firstly, there's the idea that low quality leisure time is the ONLY way through which I can fully unwind. Secondly, when this belief is acted out, it seems to imply that the consequence of failing to get these hours are severe enough that sleep should be postponed and all my routines abandoned so that I can "catch up" on this low quality leisure.

Is there actually any truth in this at all?
The most obvious thing to criticise is that it's the only way I can unwind. There are plenty of other things that I can choose to do. I just tend to gravitate towards it out of habit rather than any intention or meaning. I even have direct evidence to the contrary. When I had the brief period of time when I left all my sources of connection to the internet at work in the evenings, I had no choice but to find some other ways to wind down in the evening. During this time, I was more relaxed, better rested and had a much steadier mood than ever before! Now that I think about it this disproves both the both the "type of activity" and "duration of activity" assumptions.

Does this low quality leisure time actually relax me at all? It definitely doesn't relax me mentally. There's always plenty I end up seeing as I traverse my trail through my frequently visited sites that gets me angry and riled up. That's exactly what the algorithms want. Outraged users are engaged users. Engagement means more ad viewing time. Which means more profit for companies that I fucking hate. The only thing about it that could be in anyway conceived as mentally relaxing is that it soothes the compulsive checking habits and strong sense of FOMO tjat has been engineered into me over the years. Maybe I can get to sleep more easily without that anxiety? Still seems like a shit situation. Something else to think about.

It's definitely physically relaxing, but I don't think that's inherent to the activity of browsing the internet. It's due to how I have do it: sitting down. I know that sounds really really obvious, but it's important to realise! On a typical day I will have been on my feet for most of it while at work, and then gone to the gym for 90 odd minutes to perform a whole lot of high intensity exercise. I don't think it's unreasonable to want to just sit down for a bit after that. The insight afforded by this incredibly mundane seeming observation is that there are a lot of things I can do to unwind while sitting down! I can read a book or a newspaper, I can listen to a podcast for a while. I could even just sit there! I could close my eyes and nap for a while.

The two central components for the evening/post work winding down leisure time seem to be:

1. Sitting down for a while after being on my feet all day
2. Doing something that I choose to do

The problem with getting online during this time is that I often feel like I've been sucked into something on it rather than having chosen something to do on it. I end up feeling compelled as if I was doing something for someone else. In some sense that's exactly what ends up happening.
I started thinking about this after the day that I had on Wednesday this week. I had a very early start as I had to get to East Grinstead for 9am. I spend a good half of the day travelling, and got caught at Tunbridge Wells train station for an hour while there was a fault. After all this I went to work for a half day, which was still quite busy and intense. Finally I went to the gym after work. There was no way to put it off as it was going to be so hot the following day that there was basically no chance of postponing the session.

I was shattered by the time I had finished the training session. I'd also had no internet throughout the course of the day. So I stayed up past my Freedom schedule late into the morning. "I need to relax and unwind," I told myself. However, this method of relaxation resulted in less sleep after one of the longest and busiest days I have had for quite a while. The following day was one characterised by lethargy quite unlike anything I had felt since the trip to Motherwell for junior Nationals. That's when I started to reflect a bit more on this belief that I had about needing this to unwind.
So it's quite clear now that there is effectively no truth in the original statement. I have figured out some things that are true, which will form the basis for a new belief about the nature of my relaxation:

• Internet doesn't help me relax, it gets me riled up (as it's designed to do).
• It only helps to sooth FOMO and checking habits engineered into me
• I really want to just sit down for a while after an active day of work and training
• There are lots of other things I can do while sitting down that don't get me worked up. These include: reading a book, reading a newspaper, listening to a podcast, eating dinner, taking a nap or even just sitting there and letting my brain wander.
• Allowing web browsing time beyond the boundaries I wish to have in place is just detrimental in every possible way. There is no advantage gained from letting this happen.
• When the time I have allotted to low quality leisure time has been eaten into by other things, or that my daily rhythm has been disturbed, I should look to spend less time on screens to relax, not more.
• A significan factor in whether an activity is relaxing or not is the sense of volition; it being something that I chose to spend my time. When I fall into the traps laid by the attention engineers, that aspect of choice evaporates, so I am no longer spending the time on my terms, and so it is not relaxing and gets me wound up again.

I don't need to use the internet to relax in the evening. I relax best by sitting down for a while so that the tension of being on my feet all day dissipates, and by doing something I choose to do."

Clarity

I am at that stage again when i'm getting very excited at a lot of different prospects. I feel very enthused about the prospect of the Google Tasks/Calendar for really "getting it together." This begs the question, "for what purpose am I getting it together?"

It occurred to me last night as I was doing my pre-sleep brain dump/jotting down of ideas that while I know what the things are that I want to work on in terms of their type, I am very unclear about the specifics for each type. For example, I know that I want to work on my diet, but I don't know what "work on" entails at the moment. Likewise for my training and others. Let's start by looking at what I do have some clarity on, then use that as a guideline to analyse the other areas.

Sleep

I am working to get myself into a consistent and repeatable sleep schedule. I am doing so by waking up at 7am (or earlier as is the case today) every morning, and by implementing the Freedom software to kick in at 9pm so that I have a cue that it's time to start winding down for the day, and so that I am shifted out of any state of inertia that internet based distractions tend to induce.

In this instance, I know both the desired outcome and what I have to do to achieve it (outcome and process)

Training

Based upon the insight gained from analysing what I am doing for my sleep, it would be prudent to give some consideration as to my desired outcomes from training. I want to improve my powerlifting total while building/retaining as much muscle mass as possible.
What process would I have to follow to achieve this out outcome? I would need to follow a weight training program that is designed towards these goals, and follow it consistently for many months.
Thankfully I already have this, as I have Emm as my coach!

What can I do to make sure that I actually enact this process?

1. Get plenty of sleep on a consistent basis so that I have the energy to train after work. In fact only one "proper" training day falls on a work day (Wednesday)
2. Keep my training spreadsheet updated.
3. Communicate at least once a week with Emm
4. Formulate and act out a "getting home from work" routine that keeps me on my feet and gets me to the gym after work/at the appropriate time.
5. Plan my training sessions into my daily and weekly schedule. Friday and Saturday sessions in the morning perhaps? Going to the gym in the middle of the day on a Saturday really splinters it.
6. "If in doubt, go to the gym." I can sack off if I really want to, but I can only make that decision if I am at the gym. Pre-workout, coffee etc is all fair game if it gets me there
7. In the winter I will need to develop a system for getting to the gym in the dark by always having lights and high vis ready to go. Gloves and waterproof trousers too for cycling in the rain?
8. Keep the sessions short! Focus on what matters, do the accessories on GPP days.

Diet

I am quite overweight even taking into account that I am quite well muscled. Whichever way you look at it, I am carrying an excessive amount of body fat. My desired outcomes are therefore a reduced bodyweight through fat loss, while maintaining all my muscle mass, thus resulting in vastly improved body composition. A scale weight of 90kg would be a good target to aim for.

What process would I have to follow to achieve this out outcome?

1. Track the food that I eat on an app such as MFP so that I am in an appropriate calorie deficit.
2. Measure my bodyweight regularly. This is so that I know that I am on target and that my calorie target is appropriate.
3. Make a rough plan of the meals I will eat over the course of the week as part of my weekly review & plan process.
4. Have ready made meals (such as those from Musclefood) in the freezer for when I am tired. This way there is always a "proper" meal in the house for when my willpower lapses.

There's an expectation that I have that I need to violate or at least need to subvert in order to stick to this, which is that I will get substantially weaker in the lifts that I care about in the process of losing body fat. **This is not true. In fact, not only will I at least maintain my current performance, I may even get substantially stronger!

A Fair Attempt at Freedom (Written 22/07/2019)

As much as it pains me to admit it, I have so many things that I am thinking about in the evening that it's so much more efficient to write digitally than it is to write the old fashioned way. It is also much easier to organise my thoughts properly. Also it seems to be a common characteristic of anything that I write that I must start with at least one paragraph that's completely tangential to what I actually want to write about. This will do for now.

What I want to write about is the schedule that I have agreed upon with myself for the "Freedom" website blocking software. I used it for a bit initially and thought it was amazing. I then went way too hard with it right off the bat, resulting in relapse and binges of Twitch streams to 4am (when I would have to leave for work at 8am).

The truth of the matter is that I am not going to be able to completely hermitize (?) and cut myself off from the world. At the same time I am acutely aware that spending time in the digital space at the detriment to almost everything else is one, if not the worst, characteristics that I have. So there has to be some compromise.

I have reached something that I think is fair and reasonable based on what is currently going on in my life. For the hours of 7pm-9pm on weekdays, I am free to use the internet as I wish. For the rest of the time, my Freedom blocklist is in action. It's in action right now. I can still do things such as writing, as I am doing so right now, but it does some very important things.

Firstly, it helps me to set the tone for the day. My energy is at it's highest quantity and quality in the mornings, so it is important to me that I am able to bring myself into the day properly, and transition that seamlessly into doing the stuff that matters. By giving myself the freedom from the temptation of distracting websites I can actually spend my mornings the way I want to. This is a big improvement on spending mornings on the autopilot that has been subversively programmed into me by other forces (looking at you Zucc).

Secondly, it's a cue that it's time to wind down for the evening. One of the worst effects that unrestricted exposure to the internet has on me is its ability to keep me awake far beyond when I feel the land of dreams calling me away. When the block list kicks in automatically at 9pm, it's a cue that breaks me out of the state I was previously in. Whether that be intensely chatting away on whatsapp, or monging out to a stream on Twitch, It breaks me out of those loops and signals, "It's time to start winding down now Charlie."

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, is that I think it's a completely reasonable schedule that I negotiated fairly with myself One of the biggest pitfalls of my previous attempts to implement the Freedom software was just going for a blanket ban on everything right from the start. I would consider myself a "heavy user" of tech/the internet as it is currently how I spend 90+% of my time when i'm not at work or asleep. One can draw parallels here between forcing a heavy drug addict to quit cold turkey. It was puritanical in its intentions, but resulted in putting me in a "deprivation mindset." Feelings of longing, FOMO and cravings kicked in. It didn't last long before I snuck my way around the ban by uninstalling the software and letting myself loose on a bender of 21st century digital hedonism.

When I imposed the blanket ban on myself, it really was an imposition. I was coming from a place of "should." I was not being reasonable with myself. This time round, there was some conversation with myself:

*What is it that is upsetting me the most and making me needlessly miserable? "I believe that the amount of time that I spend online and the resultant loss of sleep is a major contributor to my feelings of sadness and frustration towards myself, and directly inhibits my ability to study, exercise and walk the path that I want to follow."

*Is this something that I can do something about? "Yes it is. I can choose to spend less time online and more time in the real world. No one is holding a gun to my head and forcing me to stay on the internet to 2am every morning.

*How much time online (as low quality leisure) could you cut down? Could you cut it all out from the start? "I don't think I could do that at this time. I would like to get there eventually. If I were to go cold turkey, it would be such a drastic upheaval to the way my days are spent that I would be overwhelmed and quickly return to the comfort and safety of my old habits."

*Could you manage only one hour of online leisure a day? "I think that would be too little. It would be substantially better than complete abstinence, but I still think it would be unsustainable given just how abruptly it would shift the general course of my day."

Could you manage on two hours of online leisure a day? "I think that might actually be in the realms of possibility. Two hours is plenty to scratch any major digital itches I might have so that I don't fall into the deprivation trap. It would be a challenge to shift to a day where only two of the hours are online leisure time, but I think that it's a challenge I am capable of rising to."

For the sake of argument, how about 3 hours a day? "There is absolutely zero doubt in my mind that I could succeed on 3 hours a day of online leisure, provided that this time is scheduled appropriately. In fact I will readjust my Freedom schedule to 3 hours a day of "free time" I want to guarantee success, and giving myself that extra hour will help me do just that. 6-9pm on weekdays."

Funny how that works out. Even as I write this my plan and implementation gets refined. There's another crucial advantage to the 6pm-9pm schedule: There's still an whole hour between when I get home from work and when "playtime" begins. This is an ideal time for a getting home from work routine.

What Do I Spend My Time On? (Written 21/7/2019)

After watching Jorbs’s video, I have been inspired to think a little bit more deeply about not only the things that I do in the course of the day, but more generally about the types of things that I spend my time on. If we can group things into classes that are fair and representative, there may be approaches that can be applied more widely and more efficiently.

In the spirit of the fantastic rant that was posted in r/fitness, I will be mindful of falling into the min/max trap here. Execution is not a given. I am not trying to transmute effort in the actual act of life into the time spent planning here. I am however undergoing this exercise of thinking and planning so that I might apply as much effort as possible to the things that really matter to me.
There’s a few different classes of activity that jump out at me immediately:

• Appointments: This is any sort of activity where I have agreed to be somewhere or do something on someone else’s schedule. Loosely speaking these activities are fixed in their time and location. Doctor’s appointments, interviews, coaching calls with Todd even work at a job would fall in this class. My time is not my own in this class.
• Leisure: This one is quite simple. It’s anything that i’m doing mostly for the sake of doing it, when i’m not doing things that explicitly work towards a big outcome that I want or to the person I want to become. Leisure can be high or low quality, and structured or unstructure
• Upkeep: These are tasks that must be done on a frequent, consistent (perhaps daily) basis that allow me to continue to function as an effective, reasonably happy human being. Some of these things are daily, such as doing the dishwasher and tidying the kitchen/my bedroom, and keeping myself clean and well presented. Other things are on more of a weekly rhythm, such as doing a weekly food shop, preparing meals in advance for the week ahead, making a plan for the week ahead etc. Staying on top of things would be another succinct way of describing this class.
• Setup: This describes things that require an initial investment of time to get to the upkeep stage.
• Stuff: Loosely, this class describes tasks. Things that have to be done but are of a one-off nature. I might need to go to a specific shop for a specific item, make a phone call to my bank, send an email, go get a haircut.

This is not going to be exhaustive or complete. There are some things that may overlap, and some that may not fit cleanly into any class. The point is that it gives me a FRAMEWORK, a place to start thinking about how I approach the stuff that comes up in my life. It will naturally become more refined as I become more experienced.

The Weekly Schedule and Its Constraints.

The key tool that I will use to organise my time and effort is a weekly schedule. This outlines everything that will happen in the course of the week that can be scheduled in advance.
As far as I have figured out, there are two constraints to the weekly schedule that must be imposed in a top-down manner. The first is the appointments (including employment) that are scheduled for that week. Secondary to scheduled appointments is accounting for any associated travel time.

What is the appropriate way to tackle each class?

Appointments: Keep a calendar of some description that details the date, time and location of each appointment. When a new appointment is made, it should be added to this calendar. This should be reviewed once a week to look ahead to the following week. Upcoming appointments are then placed in the commensurate slot in the week.

My Ideal System

Have a calendar that holds information on all appointments .Build a weekly schedule skeleton that is based on my waking hours and appointments. This would typically be done on a Sunday for the following week. Once the skeleton is built, I will write out a list of all the things that I wish to accomplish this week. This would typically be hours of studying/study sessions, training sessions, time to spend on other projects, high quality leisure, low quality leisure Distribute these things across my weekdays Each morning, review the schedule for that particular day to refocus.

UPDATE - 24/07/2017 The Google Calendar and Google Tasks combo has everything (I think) that I need to make the system above work:

• It has weekly and daily schedules, broken down hour by hour
• I can schedule recurring events for stuff that repeats weekly
• I can keep multiple lists for different tasks (weekly/daily)
• I can map the to-do's from Tasks straight into the calendar
• I can put appointments straight into it, so that they are automatically included into the schedule
• Most importantly, it puts my habit of using my laptop first thing in the morning to good use.As part of my morning routine, I will still use my laptop, but I will be doing so to look at the day's schedule, and allocating tasks and leisure time appropriately.

It will take a bit of practice to get this working to its full potential. Once all the parts are properly greased, this will be a fantastic tool that will provide me with so much more time than I thought I had.

How My Ideas, Thinking and Efforts Develop

One thing that's become clear to me is that one of the greatest advantages to blogging all of the things that I write is that it automatically puts them into a chronological catalogue. This is a much easier way of keeping track of my thoughts overtime than just having a series of documents floating around in a folder that I probably won't ever look back through. So now i'm organising my thoughts not just in the moment through the act of writing, but over longer timescales too.

I'll be uploading several posts in the next day or so, which I have written over the past few days. I don't think I can back date publications on Blogger, so i'll put the original date of writing in the title.

Questions from Todd: Programming Considerations for a "Slow Twitch" Athlete

"...whilst its in my head what programming considerations would you give to someone who is very slow twitch and to what extent does it matter (i.e. principles of strength are the same regardless of person and individual differences is arguably last priority)."

First things first: how do you know that said person is slow twitch? Have you done a muscle biopsy on said person and observed an overwhelming majority of type 1 muscle fibres? Because as far as I am aware this is the only way you can actually know this. In colloquial training speak, when someone describes an athlete as fast twitch or slow twitch, what they are actually describing is a bias towards longer duration endurance activities versus a bias towards shorter duration, more explosive, higher output activities. The former claims measurement of a physiological property of one's muscles. The other is an observation of a training response and the activities a person tends towards.

I know that this sounds really pedantic, but it's really important to understand. This is because understanding what you say and what you actually know can have a substantial impact on how you both treat and train an athlete in the long run. Muscle fibre type is a component of the types of activity/sport an athlete will lean towards and be better at (and it's a big component for sure) but it is not the whole picture.

Let's see if I can clarify what I mean with an example. Suppose you have a long distance runner that comes to you because he wants to add some resistance training to his program. You put said runner through a whole bunch of baseline testing and, lo and behold, they perform much better at higher rep, consistent output type activities than they are at the heavy, maximum force production stuff. Is it reasonable to conclude that this result is because they are a "slow twitch" athlete? Or are they just untrained in this physical capacity? 

I saw a write up of a study in the Barbell Medicine research review outlining how one's "knowledge" of their genetics can drastically affect their physiology and response to training. Here is the relevant excerpt for our discussion:

"Notably, the individuals informed they had the “high risk” genotype reached a significantly lower capacity for oxygen and carbon dioxide exchange compared to their own baseline test, as well as a decrease in maximum ventilatory flow rate and endurance. In contrast, the group told they had the “protective” genotype ran longer before reporting the test felt “hard”. In the second experiment, individuals told they had the “protective” genotype had a 2.5-times greater GLP-1 (satiety hormone) response compared to their own baseline tests, as well as a 1.4-times greater subjective satiety (sense of “fullness”) compared to their baseline, regardless of their actual genotype. 

This paper shows how simply learning of one’s genetic predisposition -- in some cases regardless of actual underlying genetics -- can have substantial consequences on outcomes."

My argument is going to stem from the assumption that because there exists popular perceptions of a) genetics as fixed and inherent properties of a person, and b) muscle fibre type as consequence of one's genetics, we can therefore map the conclusions of this study into the context of labelling someone as slow twitch or fast twitch. If you tell someone that they are slow twitch and will have a muted response to traditional strength training, that's probably what you will observe now! You've kneecapped them with a biospsychosocial crowbar. You've killed their buy-in and removed an aspect of self-efficacy from the lifter, by presenting it as something they have less control over, all in one go. This is why it is so important to really understand what it is you know and how you can act upon it, because the effects propagate in profound ways that aren't immediately obvious.

It's even becoming apparent that there is a huge degree of plasticity in the properties and typing of muscle fibre. There's plenty of stuff out there that I've read, probably from Dr Andy Galpin, that I can't be arsed to look up or reference properly, that seems to suggest that not can muscle fibres change types as a response to training, but even that different segments along the same muscle fibre can display properties of the different types. The reality is blurry, in contrast to the nice, tidy model with which you may have been initially presented.

Perhaps the most relevant resource to this question is the results of the 2017 Project Momentum. This was run by Mike Tuchscherer (I have to look up how to spell that surname every time) and RTS. The aim was essentially to parse out whether there was any meaningful results in identifying this distinction and adjusting training accordingly. The hypothesis they were testing was:

"Lifters who can do low reps with 80% of 1RM are fast-twitch dominant and therefore should train with low reps per set.  That will allow them to progress the fastest."

This sounds almost perfectly aligned with your question right? Of the three main conclusions, the one that is most relevant and informative is this:

"Lifters seem to make better progress from doing what they are bad at. This was the opposite of what I had originally heard. But the effect was far from dramatic.  In fact, I’d say it only gives you a nudge as to which direction you should take your experimentation."

I strongly recommend you read the full write up of the results of this Project Momentum.

If there is a physical capacity that an athlete needs to improve, then they have to work on it. They may have a more robust or muted to a certain type of training stress, but that will largely determine how much work they need to do and how long it will take to achieve the desired improvements, not the type of work they should be doing to get there. Training response goes so far beyond just muscle fibre type, and any good coach should beware of jumping to conclusions that result in inappropriate labels that can substantially hamper an athlete through many different channels.

In conclusion: can you see why WhatsApp is such a shit place to have an in depth conversation now Todd? :P