5-Day Mini Course: Day 4

Strength, Cardio & Stability

The 3 Big Rocks

Objectives:

  • Understand the 3 big rocks of movement: strength, cardio, and stability.
  • Activity levels need to be high if you want to live a vibrant, healthy life.
  • Use Active Passion to stay more active. Use workouts to improve AP.

We are made to move. Take movement away from a human and the results are scary. Especially for many of us who sit at desks all day or spend lots of time in our cars, we need to find ways to move our bodies. That’s step 1.

As far as your personal movement practice, that will be determined by your goals. Go back to DAY 1 and revisit your strategy and vision.

What do you want to do? Training for a 10k will require different things than training for the goal of getting a six pack.

Regardless of your specific goal, you should be addressing each one of the three big rocks, strength, cardio, and stability. Here’s why:

Strength

  • Improve metabolism and protect yourself from metabolic issues
  • Protect bones from breaking
  • Be able to do cool shit
  • Look better = more confidence

Cardio, both aerobic and anaerobic

  • You will live longer and better
  • Have more energy
  • Be able to do more cool shit
  • Recover better from training and life.

Stability

  • Balanced muscles will improve posture, breathing and movement
  • Protect joints from wear and tear
  • Be able to train harder and do cool shit with less injury risk

You want to have a sense of where you are when it comes to total activity levels. An easy way to measure this is to look at your daily step count. If you have a wearable like a fitbit or apple watch, this will give you the best data.

But even your phone will give you step count. Of course you wont have your phone on you for every step you take, but it will at least give you some data. If you’re under 5k steps per day, you’ll want to get this up closer to 7 or 8k. Ideally, you’ll want to reach north of 10k steps a day.

Active Passion

Active Passion will help you achieve that higher activity goal. An Active Passive is simply that physical activity that you just love to do. There’s no forcing you to do it. There’s no dragging you out of bed to do. You are intrinsically motivated to do it.

Some examples from my personal life are the sports of surfing and tennis.

Every one of my successful super fit clients has found this for himself. 

It could be basketball, skiing, snowboarding, biking, swimming, even running or lifting weights can work.

5-Minute Homework Day 4

1. What is your total daily activity: low, moderate, high, very high. (Write down average daily steps if you have it.)

2. Are you doing any strength training? Low intensity cardio, ie, jogging, walking, biking, swimming? High intensity cardio – HIIT, metabolic conditioning, sprinting? Stability work, ie, yoga, stretching, balance training? If so, how many times per week of each?

  • Strength:
  • Cardio low intensity:
  • Cardio high intensity:
  • Stability / balance / stretching / yoga:

3. Write down one activity below. Make sure to include the date and time you will do it as well. Spend a few minutes to think of a potential active passion and schedule it into your calendar. Schedule the tennis game. Go to the basketball court for a pick-up game. Dust off your mountain bike and get out there. Bust out the goggles and set a time and date to go for a swim. You get the idea.

End of Day 4. Fantastic work!