Matthew Mossotti

Someone recently contacted me and asked for help getting jump started into a fitness lifestyle. Here’s what I wrote them.

Alright, you’re trying to get a jump start… Here’s what I would suggest:

1)     Decide that your fitness is a non-negotiable priority of your time here on earth. Like bathing, or making a living, automatically account for the time your daily regimen requires (6 days a week –lifting for no more than 45 min and doing cardio for no longer than 30 min) – consider it sacred time, devoted to the choice you’ve made to attend to your physiological machine – and know that the better you take care of your body, the better it will take care of the “you” inside of it.

2)     Maximize your effort during the time you carve aside to develop your body. It helps sustain the long-term viability of the decision to devote your energy to fitness in a tremendous way if your training routines can average one hour(ish) per day (resistance training and cardiovascular combined). However, if you intend to maximize results (and why wouldn’t you? – it’s time you’ve set aside), embrace every minute of cardio as an opportunity to take your body to its peak performance and every repetition of every set as an opportunity to make your machine fail. In the gym, getting to failure means you have succeeded. Your body doesn’t dig on failing. It builds itself in direct response to failure, so it won’t fail the next time at the same level of challenge.

3)     Get clever with your approach to creating your training routines. Learn how your body responds in specific ways to specific styles of movements and use your understanding to perpetually outwit your body, which you keep in a constant state of catch-up to the challenges you design for it. At the end of the day, most of the fulfillment of fitness is the recognition of the manifestations of your deliberate and specific objectives (performance and aesthetic). It will get really boring really quickly if you fall into a rut of the same routine week in and week out.

4)     Eat with an objective mind. You have to eat. But you don’t have to eat by the standards set before you by your culture. Rather, you embrace the science of nutrition and consider your body your guinea pig. Forget the dietery habits that your culture has installed into you. Relearn how to eat. You never decided to eat three meals a day – you were told that’s what humans do. Eat five to seven times a day. Prepare yourself to embrace every morsel of food as something that either edifies or corrupts your objectives for your physiological machine.

5)     Enjoy yourself. Rejoice in your suffering!!! From having great ipod mixes, to getting into good training partnerships (usually temporary, so that you never allow anyone else’s accountability or life-situation to influence yours), to asking specific questions to others training around you (and just getting to know them) – all these things enhance the quality of your spirit for the time you are present at your gym. Know that on the other side of every workout lies a natural euphoria – the endorphin rush, your body’s thank you card for the challenge you provided.

All of my best always,

Matthew Mossotti