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Switching it up: CrossFit and the welders of Rogue Fitness

On the welding floor, no one works on one kind of job for more than half a day before switching to a batch of something different. If you don’t vary the task, he says, “you wear people out.” — Learning to Breathe Fire by J.C. Herz

Just finished this book on a flight today. Last night I did a chest workout and did some bench presses in the home gym. I have the same setup my brother and a bunch of friends ended up with during lockdown and the few years after.

A Rogue rack, Rogue barbell, Rogue plates, etc. (I do have some mismatched plates and a bunch of kettlebells from Rep Fitness.)

Oh yah but the book. It has a good history of a few different characters involved in the early days of CrossFit.

I knew Rogue sponsored CrossFit in some way but didn’t know the founder of Rogue had a CrossFit box. The first product was a set of Olympic rings for CrossFit workouts. Eventually they’d build rigs and then home racks and then just about everything you’d need for a home gym.

It’s not necessarily an intentional connection, but it sounds like the welding jobs vary day to day much like a CrossFit workout varies from day to day. Workouts are intense but interesting.

Part of the appeal of CrossFit is the slot machine aspect. Yes, they’re thought through from the coach’s end. And I’m sure more experienced CrossFit people see the patterns from week to week.

But early on while on the receiving end of those workouts, I get that anticipation walking in and seeing what’s on the whiteboard.

One certainty: I’ll touch something made by Rogue. Beyond that, there’s one main question.

In what way will I be punished today?

Can’t wait.

Musashi: the age we live in (or something)

“We live in an age when a clever publicity seeker can rule the roost, at least as far as ordinary people are concerned.” (Eiji Yoshikawa, Musashi)

One reason Musashi is known as the greatest swordsman ever is that he wrote about being a great swordsman. I’ve done the cursory reddit search and the overall vibe seems to be that, no, he wasn’t the greatest swordsman ever.

But, hey, a portion of the world thinks he is so that’s still an accomplishment.

Persuasion was and will always be powerful. Even in the age of AI, some of the problems stem from an LLM response being pretty good at checking boxes for persuasion even in cases when facts are wrong.

Today everyone can be a clever publicity seeker. And more ordinary people than ever are seeking publicity. Clever ordinary people even realized they could rule the roost by highlighting just how ordinary they are.

There seemed to be a vacuum when Hubs life fulfilled the very ordinary dream of leaving the ordinary 9-to-5 for full-time content creation. And you likely know at least one person who’s a full-time content creator. So even that is becoming somewhat ordinary.

So how do you rule the roost today?

Define your own roost with a purple cow swimming in a blue ocean.

Or something.

The Four-Pack Revolution: What sets off your snacking?

When it comes to unhealthy eating, what sets you off? Do you start focusing on everything that needs to get done and end up feeling stressed as a result? When you are bored, do you use food as a distraction? Or has eating become a hobby you share with friends? Almost every cue or trigger fits into one of the following five categories.

— “The Four-Pack Revolution” by Chael Sonnen

Alright so abs are made in the kitchen and all that.

I was tracking my food closely for a couple months… a couple months ago. So I basically haven’t been tracking.

I was losing 1-2 pounds a week for a couple months. You’ve probably guessed (correctly) that it was during those first couple months when I was tracking.

Still, even without tracking I know one thing for sure: I’m snacking too much. Even when I was tracking my food, one of the main benefits of doing it was that it gave me a nice hard signal at night that it was time to stop snacking.

Right now if I could magically remove all the snacking I’d guess I’d be under my goal of 1800 calories on some days, if not most days.

Here are the 5 categories of snacking cues/triggers Chael Sonnen lists and how they end up showing up in my life.

  1. Location: There’s free food at the office. The meals, totally fine. The snacks I pass by every time I walk to a meeting or go to the bathroom… it gets tough being tempted 20 times a day.
  2. Time: Even if I can make it through the work day, the breakdown can happen before or after dinner. If I ate clean during the day, I think my mind starts getting into “Well, I can reward myself now” mode. (One trick for stopping this: eat dinner immediately so there’s no snack before, then floss my teeth immediately because I don’t want to floss twice.)
  3. Emotional state: I’ve realized that the problem isn’t necessarily that I snack when I’m stressed—which I do. It’s that I also eat unhealthy when I’m feeling good and celebrating something. So basically I turn to food no matter what emotional state I’m in.
  4. Other people: One thing I noticed moving from New York to San Francisco—and this also is just me and the different friend groups getting older as well—is that people drink less. Now I’m rarely at a gathering where a majority of people are drinking. So that’s good. Though I don’t exactly have a food version of that because I really enjoy food and reading about food and watching videos aIbout food. And a bunch of friends here also share that interest. That said, it’s not like all of them struggle with overeating. They show restraint at the same gatherings. I don’t need to be the person finishing all the remaining food.
  5. Actions: I’ve heard a rule along the lines of, “Don’t eat standing up”. As mentioned, I snack between meetings. I grab a snack before getting to the desk. I snack when I get home. I snack to fit something in before I brush and get ready for bed.

So now that I’ve written all that above, what would uncle Chael recommend?

Break the cycle, replace with a new behavior, and condition the new behavior.

Gotta drill it. For like… 2 days I was replacing snacking with making tea. I can probably drill it a bit more. But also tea just might not be quite satisfying enough to replace snacking. I also tried baby carrots. Yes, I should probably replace it with something that isn’t going in my mouth.

But, hey, one step at a time. Hopefully a few weeks from now I’ll update you with the great replacements I chose and drilled.

Program hopping… into CrossFit (and realizing I’ve been qualified age-wise for “Masters” divisions for a few years now)

In the first round of a WOD like “Kelly” (a 400-meter sprint, 30 jumps onto a 24-inch box, then 30 wall balls, five rounds), you think, “Why am I doing this? I could be watching TV on a treadmill.” Your rationalizing brain still works well enough to have thoughts like this. By round four, your ability to formulate alternative scenarios is completely gone.

— “Learning to Breathe Fire: The Rise of CrossFit and the Primal Future of Fitness” by J.C. Herz

A few weeks ago a buddy told me he’s been working out every day for a couple months. For part of that he’s been using ClassPass to try out different classes. I did a ClassPass trial so I could join him for a few classes. A Barry’s class ripped through most of the trial credits, but I still had some left so I thought I’d try out CrossFit.

(Also the coaches were super welcoming even though sometimes I do overthink if they’d rather not have ClassPass people coming in or if it’s really not meant to be used more than a couple times and the expectation is that I join for real etc. continual overthinking etc.)

First workout was:

  • 2-mile run
  • 100 cleans

Or it might’ve been 50 cleans (100 total because it was a partner workout)

The weight doesn’t matter other than that it was very light for internet standards. But definitely enough for me to be toast by the end. I mean the run left me toast already because I’m not in shape.

(I’ve read enough self-development books that I know I should be saying “I’m not in shape… yet!” but anyway yeah I’m not in shape.)

I looked deep in my email to see how my CrossFit experience went in the past. Looks like I did it for 3 months in 2013 in New York and then for 2 months in 2016, also in New York. And I did a few classes in 2011 in San Diego.

I usually ended up tweaking something and stopping. So check back in a few weeks to see if I’ve suffered the same fate. Hope not! The main way I’m trying to avoid that is keeping the frequency pretty low initially.

This time I’m aiming to go 1-2 times a week (instead of 3-4 times a week I had in mind in the past) for these first 6 weeks. There’s a trip to Hawaii and a small chance at some point I’ll be shirtless in front of family. So it’d be nice to be a few pounds down.

And I know yadda yadda yadda, it happens in the kitchen and all that and workout wise 2 hard workouts will not do the trick. But it’s fun, there’s a little bit of chit chat, and I sometimes get the mere-mortal non-olympic version of the feeling described in the quote that opens the book above (which is a history of CrossFit that I’m enjoying quite a bit.)

At the peak of tremendous and victorious effort, while the blood is pounding in your head, all suddenly becomes quiet within you. Everything seems clearer and whiter than ever before, as if great spotlights had been turned on. At that moment, you have the conviction that you contain all the power in the world, that you are capable of everything, that you have wings. There is no more precious moment in life than this, the white moment, and you will work very hard for years just to taste it again. —YURI VLASOV, RUSSIAN OLYMPIC WEIGHTLIFTER, THE FIRST MAN TO CLEAN AND JERK 200 KG

The white moment is why doing 100 cleans is more interesting than a few sets on the functional trainer.

“Tiny Experiments”: The 1-1-1-1-1 pact

Microwaving another bag of broccoli

That was the 1 habit I wanted to work on.

The rest of the 1-1-1-1-1 pact

  • 1 habit
  • 10 pages
  • 100 reps
  • 1000 words
  • 10000 steps
    Which adds up to 11,111 and maps to
  • Habit building
  • Reading
  • Weightlifting
  • Writing
  • and Walking
    Initially I’m aiming for 500 days but I want to do these daily for the rest of my life. Which means the intensity is lower than other challenges you might come across. Which are great, which I’ve definitely tried and strayed off of.

The PACT idea is from Tiny Experiments. You decide “I will ACTION for DURATION”

It stands for

  • Purposeful: it’s about the daily behaviors
  • Actionable: I know these are doable
  • Continuous: I’m going for daily for… hopefully decades
  • Trackable

I already do most of these on various days but now I’m trying to be deliberate about getting all of those in every day.

So what’s with the broccoli?

1. One habit every 21 days?

This is probably Video-idea Driven Development.

I’ve long wanted to do some kind 10k, 1000, 100, 10 thing but could never figure out how to round out the “1”

  • 1 minute meditating?
  • 1 gratitude?
  • 1 video posted?
    But last week I realized 1 could be a flexible thing I could use to represent an experiment to try. The 1 also reminds me of the BJ Fogg thing of “Floss 1 tooth”:

“Think of it this way: You can keep many tiny plants alive by giving them a few drops of water a day. It’s the same with habits. There are still days when my motivation is unusually low for flossing. On those days, I floss only one tooth.”

I want to document this whole thing through vlogs so, yes, I did think this might be a way to make the videos a littttle less repetitive.

I’ll be able to align the “1” to some shorter-term goal I have. Right now? Lose some weight. It starts in the kitchen, etc. so I want to eat a bag of broccoli every day.

Why this goal? First, it’s not an all-day goal. All-day goals become hard.

  • Tracking food every day takes a lot of effort initially and I always fall off.
  • Avoiding snacking is another all-day thing
  • Avoiding anything as a whole is an all-day thing
    So with these habits I’ll aim to make them things I add to the day and can very clearly say “I’m done”

With the broccoli I can cook it, eat it, say “I’m done”, then feel slight discomfort for 2 hours because I should probably split it into 2 meals.

2. We don’t have walrus meat so we need to add hard things (10 pages)

Earlier this year I read The Wide Wide Sea by Hampton Sides. It’s about Captain James Cook. It was an extremely hard life with not so great food on the ships:

Midshipman George Gilbert had stronger words for walrus flesh. He described the elaborate procedure the men improvised to make the “disgustful” meat palatable. “We let it hang up for one day that the blood might drain from it,” Gilbert wrote. “After that, we towed it overboard for twelve hours, then boiled it for four hours, and the next day cut it into steaks and fried it. And even then it was too rank both in smell and taste to make use of except with plenty of pepper.”

But Captain Cook loved it because of the goal: make maps of the world

He was finally doing what he loved and knew best: serious cartographic fieldwork, on a big scale, in an unfamiliar place. There wasn’t time for laying down much precision—the minute details would have to be filled in by later explorers—but the general idea of Alaska, its outline, was coming into focus.

Anyway, it was a reminder that life can be kind of easy compared to centuries ago. We seek out these hard things because we don’t have to hunt for food anymore. Shaan Puri had a great phrase for this sort of content: “toughness influencers”

So anyway. Speaking of books, that’s what the 10 represents: 10 pages of reading every day.

I want a daily practice for building back my ability to focus and concentrate. I know I’ve read consistently in the past. I can do it again. So I’m aiming to read 10 pages a day. A 300 page book every month.

3. “Wake up at 5am and work out”: James Altucher & Sahil Bloom (100 reps)

It is why the first thing I say, whenever a young person comes to me looking for life advice, they’re feeling lost is wake up at 5am and go work out for 30 straight days.

That’s Sahil Bloom, author of The 5 Types of Wealth, on the James Altucher podcast.

I’ve worked out regularly for more than a decade. But you wouldn’t be able to tell!

I’ve spun my tires for too long. As mentioned I want to lose some weight and I’ve bought into weightlifting being an important part of that.

I did sort of shoehorn it into the “100” here because I wanted weights to be a part of this. It sort of works:

  • 100 kettlebell swings is 100 reps
  • 5×5 w/ warmup sets is around 100 reps
  • 100 burpees in a hotel room
    100 reps is flexible.

I am not. So maybe I need a 100-rep mobility routine.

4. Amplify patterns (1000 words)

The 1000 is for 1000 words and it’s a writing habit. Good things seem to happen creatively during periods where I’m writing regularly.

From, Tiny Habits, Anne-Laure Le Cunff talks about amplifying existing activities:

Finally, for activities that are already part of your life but which you wish to engage in more regularly, a three-month pact helps reinforce and amplify patterns so you can collect better quality data to guide your journey. Incidentally, three months is roughly the length of the #100DaysofCode challenge and my own challenge of writing 100 articles in 100 workdays at Ness Labs.

She amplified things with 100 articles in 100 work days.

I already write daily in private. These are just journal entries or notes on my info diet. I don’t know if journal is the right word either. Anyway I write in Obsidian or Google Docs or Evernote or whatever app I’m using at the time is. Many days are already 1000+ words.

I want to amplify it by measuring it and steering the writing more to writing I’ll publish. Scripts for these videos or for Shorts or for blog posts.

Daily writing is great in so many ways so I want to keep it up.

5. Distract the distraction with another distraction (10,000 steps)

10,000 is for steps. You’ve probably heard of walking 10,000 steps as a goal already. You might have paced around the room trying to get 100 more steps before trying to do this sort of thing.

Walking is good for mind and body so I want to have that as a habit. I also can’t do 10,000 reps weightlifting or read 10,000 pages in a day. I might be able to blab into a microphone all day to write 10,000 useless words.

One thing I really want to use walking for is to relieve stress.

In The Comfort Crisis, Michael Easter writes about Dr. Trevor Kashey suggesting he replace food as a reward with light exercise.

He recommended that I distract the discomfort of reward hunger with another form of discomfort: light exercise. “Find some ‘calorie negative’ ways of dealing with stress,” he said. “Walking is my number one. It relieves more stress and is health promoting. It leads you to burn calories rather than onboard them. And it removes you from the situation and adds time for reflection, where you can realize that you weren’t really hungry.”

Walking is the greatest thing to pair other things with.

I have a treadmill desk set up. If I use it and just brain rot with the laptop, I still don’t feel as bad as I would have if I was melted on the couch doing the same.

But usually I do find myself actually reading and writing when I’m on the treadmill. I can type totally fine.

10,000 steps is also a nudge to get outdoors.

All 5 of the things in this 1-10-100-1000-10000 plan are daily nudges toward something broader in the long term. I’ll do another video on that later. Like, subscribe, but most important: get your reading/writing/walking/lifting in!

Thanks for checking this out.

“The 5 Types of Wealth” by Sahil Bloom: Book Notes

You’re already wealthy.
At least in some of the ways that Sahil Bloom explains in “The 5 Types of Wealth.”
Sahil left a life in finance for life as a writer. He built an audience through Twitter threads and expanded from there, eventually publishing his book.

T-shape can be good for a skillset, but it might not be great for the different types of wealth. Finance provided him a T-shaped life where he was making a lot of money but with sacrifices in other types of wealth.

What are they? Let’s take a look.

1. TIME WEALTH

“Everything I do is for the 17-year old version of myself” — Virgil Abloh

Good news: You’re a billionaire.
A TIME billionaire.
You have at least a billion seconds left in your life. It’s actually something many actual billionaires might not be able to say. Warren Buffet would probably trade some of his money to guarantee more time.

To check if you’re spending your day to day, think about your 10-year-old self and 80-year-old self.

My 10-year-old self might wonder why I stopped playing video games. Maybe it’s something that brought me joy that I could revisit.

My 17-year-old self would be happy to know I’m still making things on the internet.

I imagine my 80-year-old self would happily pay $1000 to take Booster on a walk again.
It makes me feel grateful every time I can take her on a walk.

2. PHYSICAL WEALTH

Of all things, a fit body is one of the ones that money can’t buy.
It certainly helps to afford healthy whole food, access to fitness equipment, and coaching. But you can get in shape without a ton of money.

You also can’t compress this.
And there’s only negative outlier events here. You strength won’t increase ten-fold overnight after some period of consistency.

BUT you can definitely injure yourself and set yourself back weeks or months.

Of all things, a fit body is one of the ones that money can’t buy.
It certainly helps to afford healthy whole food, access to fitness equipment, and coaching.
But you can get in shape without a ton of money.

The bare minimum workout for the day for me?
A walk with Booster.

3. MENTAL

Billionaires can go to space.
And it might be the only place they can go for the other kind of space: mental space.

Often they have multiple businesses.
Or a very large single business that may as well be multiple businesses.
Basically: something’s probably on fire.

Don’t have the same issue but still want a little more mental space?
The biggest bang for your buck might be re-thinking your phone.
It’s a solid slab hammering away at your brain all day.
Just when you think you’ve put it away, you realize it’s liquid metal that can ooze into the nooks and crannies of your attention.

There are plenty of methods to try for reducing screen time.
I like a combination of:
(1) The foyer method that Cal Newport talks about: charging your phone in a different room while at home
and
(2) Using the grayscale filter to make the phone less interesting.

When in doubt: walk with Booster.

4. SOCIAL

Jason McCarthy drove to nearly every state in the early days of GORUCK.
He had a couple thousand GR1s and couldn’t sell any.
But he had his Labrador with him to cheer him up.

He describes that as the minimal community: a human and a dog.

Of course, you’ll probably want some other humans around too.
As Sahil writes:

“You may need food, water, and shelter to survive, but it is human connection that allows you to thrive.”

One action:
Find a recurring activity that you and a friend would do alone anyway and do it together.
Group workouts are a common example.

When in doubt, I can always walk Booster.
Sometimes with a friend!

5. FINANCIAL

Money isn’t everything but not having it is.

One tip that stuck out for me:
Don’t splurge on everything and don’t cheap out on everything.

This doesn’t also mean to be in the middle on everything.
Think more like a barbell.
Splurge on the things you really love in life.
Be frugal with things you don’t care about.

My dumb examples:
I’ll splurge on nice cuts of steak because I enjoy cooking and eating steak.
But I also give myself haircuts because I’m not super particular about my hair and like the time savings.
For many many things, I’ll just buy whatever the “good enough” result is on Amazon.

When in doubt…
Well okay, walking Booster doesn’t do much for financial wealth.
But it’s a nice reminder that money isn’t everything.

WRITING STASH

Warren Buffet’s money got long because he got in the game when he was 10 and stayed in the game the entire time.

How?
Of course, the money is nice.
But he also just enjoyed the process itself.

“I also want to assure you that I have never felt better.
I love running Berkshire, and if enjoying life promotes longevity, Methuselah’s record is in jeopardy.”