fitness Archives - Page 2 of 5 - Joshua Spodek

Blog / Leadership

Why football is better than soccer. Actually, why any sport is better than soccer.

This post is about integrity. I like watching football. Watching a game or two on a Sunday is one of the main reasons I haven't gotten rid of my tv. Watching the Super Bowl in another country inevitably leads to people raised outside the U.S. talking about the superiority of soccer. They talk about how football has so many breaks in the action and something about grace or strategy. I see preferences between sports as a matter of personal taste so I don't find their arguments compelling. I don't argue back that football is better for the reasons I watch -- like how great players do such incredible things at the limits of what humans can do. Different sports have different rules resulting in different…

February 4, 2013

Sports in the rain and values changing

Sports in the rain and values changing

The other day it rained and I skipped playing ultimate frisbee in Shanghai. It reminded me of playing in college and after. In the Northeast of the U.S., especially in late fall, leading to Regionals, it rained and snowed a lot. Weather didn't change that you simply went to practice. We practiced and played in snow, wind, rain, etc. I played disc the year I lived in Paris, taking a year off from school. We played on Sunday afternoons there. The fields, incidentally, were at a beautiful spot at the park in front of Les Invalides, pictured here: I remember one Sunday it rained like a monsoon. Huge droplets of rain, densely packed, falling straight down all day long. I showed up to the fields…

January 29, 2013

Blog / Fitness / Tips

Exercise helps everything

Exercise helps everything. I can't think of any time or situation exercise doesn't help. Whenever I'm not sure what to do, I think, "exercise can't hurt." Even if all I do is a burpee or two, I find it clarifies my thoughts. I've never found a case where exercise worsened a situation. Even if I'm in an insane hurry, where I feel every second counts, a push-up or two barely takes time and often reveals to me that not every second counts -- feeling that way almost always comes from stress-induced myopia that is leading me to make bad decisions. Even a few seconds of physical motion relieves the intensity and gives perspective. It overcomes an empathy gap that works for you Even simple stretching…

January 26, 2013

Sometimes all you have to do is show up

This post is about one of the best experiences of my life. I couldn't have planned it, but looking back I realized I had spent years preparing for it. When you've prepared, sometimes you only need to show up. One fall in the mid to late 90s, when I was playing ultimate seriously, I was looking for a team to play with. A good friend of mine told me about a team he was playing with and invited me to try out. In New York City getting to practices is hard, so we had to get rides with people out to Westchester. When we arrived, the captain of the team, Matty J, one of the sport's greats, who helped New York win six of seven…

January 14, 2013

Awareness / Blog / Fitness / Tips

Fooling yourself doesn’t help you

I can't help reposting a comment I put on another site. Readers here know that while I don't eat meat I don't consider avoiding it virtuous or better. I don't consider not eating meat any more healthy, virtuous, humane, delicious, or whatever than eating meat. I don't understand why so many people who eat meat call themselves vegetarian. What do they gain? As best I can tell they consider not eating meat better or virtuous. Or maybe they feel special. But then don't they feel bad when they eat meat, having told people they don't? Or when they start eating meat honestly again? Doesn't that make them seem flighty and lower their credibility, which, in turn, hurts people's impressions of them? To me, social skills…

January 9, 2013

Awareness / Blog / Exercises / Fitness

What I think about when I exercise

[This post is part of a series on my daily exercise and starting and keeping challenging habits. If you don't see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you'll get more value than reading just this post.] Nearly everyone wishes they exercised more, or at least realizes doing so would make them healthier in mind and body. So why don't people exercise more? I can't speak for everyone, but I think their motivation plays a role. American culture, for example, values convenience and saving you work, which results in a lot of sloth. Few activities after high school require most Americans to burn calories. I've been trying to pay attention to my thoughts while exercising for a while.…

January 6, 2013

Vince Lombardi: What It Takes to be Number One

Blog / Fitness / Leadership

Vince Lombardi: What It Takes to be Number One

After a couple posts on sports, I'm putting up one of the great sports coaching quotes, by Vince Lombardi. According to Wikipedia Vincent Thomas "Vince" Lombardi (June 11, 1913Â â€“ September 3, 1970) was an American football coach. He is best known as the head coach of the Green Bay Packers during the 1960s, where he led the team to three straight league championships and five in seven years, including winning the first two Super Bowls following the 1966 and 1967 NFL seasons. The National Football League's Super Bowl trophy is named in his honor. He was enshrined in the NFL's Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1971. He never had a losing season as a head coach in the NFL, compiling an impressive regular season…

December 23, 2012

Burpees — the one year review

Burpees — the one year review

[This post is part of a series on my daily exercise and starting and keeping challenging habits. If you don't see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you'll get more value than reading just this post.] Today, December 21, 2012, marks the 365th day of my exercise regiment of daily burpees. They began with me talking to a friend about exercise, then deciding to do ten a day for thirty days, then expanded to a consistent long-term daily routine. I now do two sets of twenty per day -- one just after getting up and one just before going to bed -- and four stretches before the morning set. Do I claim doing only burpees is the…

December 21, 2012

Blog / Fitness / Leadership / Tips

Common objection 1: I want to understand the root of the problem before solving it

[This post is part of a series on internal objections and blocks and how to overcome them. If you don't see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you'll get more value than reading just this post.] Objection People usually state this objection with something like I want to understand the problem before acting. I want to get at the root first. If I don't, it will just happen again. You can also call this objection Analysis Paralysis since it leads people to analyze over acting. Again, some problems require analysis, but I bet you'll find that the more you learn alternatives, like the ones below, the more you'll learn to solve problems faster. Example My classic example…

November 21, 2012

Obesity, insults, and living by your values

In a recent online discussion a guy talking about a tv show on morbidly obese people talked about people on the show disparagingly. He also said he used to be fat. Other people took him to task and criticized him as insulting and rude. I'm not sure I agree he was necessarily insulting and rude. For one thing, he later clarified he said what he did in part "to galvanise people into action and not blame their condition on nebulous causes." To me, that intent meets the Golden Rule. Maybe I'm revealing my ignorance and not that I say "you're fat" to anyone, but I don't see calling someone fat as insulting. If someone takes being called fat as an insult, I see it as…

November 14, 2012

Blog / Exercises / Freedom / Nature

The most important parts of any exercise or diet

[This post is part of a series on my daily exercise and starting and keeping challenging habits. If you don't see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you'll get more value than reading just this post.] Somehow in all my ultimate frisbee, rowing, burpee, running, and healthy food talk, I forgot to mention the most important parts of any exercise or diet regiment -- freedom! You can eat anything you want any time you want. I know I do. I can always do more burpees or run another lap of Central Park to make up for it if I have too many empty calories. You lose craving for things you don't want. In my case, processed foods…

November 8, 2012

Blog / Fitness / Nature

Science is a long way from helping diet

I wrote the following in response to this New York Times article, "Eating for Health, Not Weight" in a discussion on Hacker News. With an Ivy League PhD in physics, I'm a big fan of science. I have not observed a scientific approach to diet effective in promoting health. In my albeit limited observation, I observe no correlation between knowing a lot about food, digestion, etc and fitness or healthiness. In particular, American culture appears to approach diet most scientifically, yet has probably the least healthy population. Meanwhile, many illiterate cultures appear to have healthy diets (implying thousands of years of trial and error, admittedly a form of science, works). My observations are anecdotal, not data, so feel free to dismiss them as such. I…

September 27, 2012

My Mom, the new face of fashion

Blog / Entrepreneurship / Fitness

My Mom, the new face of fashion

It seems grandmothers running marathons appeals to a lot of people. A fitness and fashion line called Miss Matahari has profiled my mother as one of (currently the first on the page, naturally) several inspirational women representing the fitness and fashion-inspired brand. Better branding you won't find at any price. Their tagline is Have you ever wanted to do something others told you was impossible? I could get behind that perspective. Here's one of the images of the brand (neither model is my mom) Personally, I think the clothes look great. I know Natasha, the entrepreneur behind Miss Matahari, but that's not why I'm talking about her site and line. I just like how the clothes look. EDIT: I'm taking the liberty of quoting Natasha…

September 21, 2012

Why food matters

Blog / Fitness / Leadership

Why food matters

I don't know if I have to explain how shopping for, preparing, and eating food qualifies as fundamental to self-awareness and therefore leadership. A few years ago I would have considered food shopping irrelevant to self-awareness. I've changed. I'll start with an aside on how big an effect just gardening can have with Victory Gardens. During the World Wars, when mainstream food production dropped, governments promoted their citizens planting so-called victory gardens -- using whatever spare land anyone had, even window-sills, to plant fruits, vegetables, herbs or whatever you could grow. They started them in parks, some continuing as gardens to today. Here are a couple posters for the project. and Apparently, at their peak, victory gardens produced nearly half the vegetables Americans consumed and…

September 17, 2012

Blog / Education / Fitness / Leadership / Tips

If you want to change something you do, its opposite usually is no better. Look for its complement.

People seem to want to change a lot about them. I see them trying to do the opposite of what they are trying to change. Sometimes it works. More often trying to do the opposite of what they want to stop reinforces doing it more. Food For example, overweight people often think if they eat too much they should try the opposite and try to eat less. But dieting seems to predict obesity more than prevent it -- that is, people who diet tend to be more obese than those who don't (sorry I don't have a source, so feel free to read this part skeptically). I find the complement to eating too much is not to eat less but to savor and enjoy your…

September 9, 2012

Blog / Fitness / Nature

Being overweight looks depressing

Some people choose to be overweight -- Mario Batali, for example, seems to love fattening food, knows how eating it will affect him, and eats it, accepting, even celebrating, the consequences with pleasure. I take my hat off to him. This post isn't about him. I should also point out I don't consider being overweight bad. Regular readers know I don't consider such things good, bad, right, or wrong. I'm mostly interested in consequences. If someone achieves whatever weight they want, I support them, independent of what a doctor says. I should also note that I think tracing causes of obesity leads to our huge agri-business subsidies that make unhealthy food cheaper than healthy and to what I consider counterproductive laws that allow poor labeling,…

September 4, 2012

Awareness / Blog / Fitness / Tips

Too much is a problem too

I hear people talk about those who have less -- usually less materially or less opportunity -- as deserving help and compassion. With due respect to their problems, I'd like to consider another challenging situation: having too much. First let me preface the huge difference between having too little and too much: people with too much can cut back. People with limited access to resources or opportunity can't usually create them out of thin air. People with too much may not know how to cut crap out, but they can. Big difference. Walking around New York last visit, I saw people with a lot more stuff and opportunity than I saw in Asia. But I didn't see them happier. On the contrary, I saw many…

September 3, 2012

Awareness / Blog / Fitness / Freedom

An olympic shock

I tend to divide the Olympics as a business from the athletes. I respect the athletes greatly. Whatever ideals the event may have embodied, I lose respect for the Olympic committees and the collaborating corporations -- media companies, advertisers, etc -- all the time. The business seems to focus on making money while protecting its sustainable competitive advantage -- its brand -- at draconian costs to the freedom of athletes, attendees, and other participants. Meanwhile the Olympic committee takes bribes, applies rules arbitrarily, colludes with governments to curtail speech and coverage of the events, etc. The value of sports continues to surprise me Still, the value of sports perennially surprises me in raising people's awareness and cooperation, despite the politicization and commercialization of the Olympics.…

August 3, 2012

Awareness / Blog / Nature

Would you eat the cherry tomato?

Here is a deep question about values, spontaneity, risk, adventure, the best things in life, and your appetite for them. The context It begins with my mom's garden years ago when she lived in Nebraska. Now I'm not that big on tomatoes, like some people are, and less so then than now. But when I tasted the cherry tomatoes from that garden they tasted like sunshine. I couldn't believe how much flavor they had -- sweet, tangy, juicy... everything you could hope for in a piece of fruit. And with all the vines there, you could pop cherry tomatoes in your mouth all day. There were more on the vie and overnight yet more would appear. Plus she hadÂ -- I should mention it was…

July 9, 2012

Blog / Fitness / Nature / NorthKorea

Ultimate in Shanghai!

I played ultimate in Shanghai for the first time Monday and Saturday since the tournament in August in North Korea (in particular getting the end zone D and catching the goal to win the game), which was the first time in something like five years. Wow, nothing compares to playing ultimate. Even with probably 90 degree temperatures and high humidity, running around, throwing, and catching was awesome. It's like what our bodies evolved for. At 40, I thought I was done playing, but I think I'll play regularly this summer. They have games scheduled twice a week and the community, as with ultimate communities everywhere, is fun, welcoming, international, and spirited. Come to think of it, I saw a random guy in Singapore dressed like…

July 3, 2012

Blog / Fitness / Freedom

Burpee overview

[This post is part of a series on my daily exercise and starting and keeping challenging habits. If you don't see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you'll get more value than reading just this post.] Yesterday I started to consolidate posts on burpees but when I realized it was the day after the six month anniversary of starting doing them daily, I wrote a six-month review, which ended up as a long post on friendship, freedom, and motivation. It reinforces that sharing what you love fills your life with sharing, love, and the stuff you love. As people who have read all my posts on the Model and Method know, a thing's value, meaning, and purpose…

June 25, 2012

Blog / Fitness / Tips

Burpee six-month review

[This post is part of a series on my daily exercise and starting and keeping challenging habits. If you don't see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you'll get more value than reading just this post.] I refer to burpees so much I'm making a page to consolidate my burpee references (EDIT: now tomorrow's post). As I'm writing this, I only have three posts specifically on burpees (four when I post this, more evidence on how sharing what you love fills your life with sharing, love, and stuff you love), but I link to it a lot. Also, enough people I meet in person hear about burpees that it makes sense to link to this page from…

June 24, 2012

My cousin — Olympics bound?

News on my mom's side is that her sister's grand-daughter -- my first cousin once removed -- is winning competitions in her first year at Stanford. Here's an interview after she came in second at the NCAA Division I Outdoor Championships yesterday. Remember the name Brianna Bain. P.S. For those who read my Roots post, she descended from the same seventeenth century puritans.

June 7, 2012

Awareness / Blog / Leadership

The New York Times had a contest about my post

What a coincidence. The day after my long post on the counterproductivity of moralizing for leading people, using the example of deciding for others whether they should eat meat or not, the New York Times published the results of a contest to do exactly what I described as counterproductive. No contradiction here -- the New York Times's goal is not to lead people, but to sell newspapers and what works against leaders' interests (depending on how you want to lead) -- polarization and argumentation -- works for news media. Here is the statement of the contest Here are the submissions with the most votes Here is the winning submission This difference in interests illustrates a glaring bias inherent to news reports. Promoting division and argument…

May 7, 2012

Blog / Fitness / Tips

Perhaps this blog’s most useful and effective advice

For all my lessons learned, the Model, the Method, and so on, if we want to improve our lives, little works more effectively than Eat well Sleep well Exercise If you do nothing more than the above, you'll at least have a stable baseline of neutral. Last I checked, no medicine works better than exercise at keeping yourself happy. This advice costs nothing, takes little extra time, and requires no equipment. If you can't figure out how to work the above into your schedule, examine your priorities -- I suggest doing so until you see how to incorporate those three things into your life. When you do fit them into your schedule, you will find yourself generally at worst neutral to generally happy, with the…

May 2, 2012

End of content

No more pages to load