Dan John: Wandering Weights, Issue # 35

Home » Dan John: Wandering Weights, Issue # 35

First off, let’s finish up the website tour of my Art of Coaching class in London. Last week, I highlighted some of our participant’s websites, and let’s finish with Pol Murray’s. Pol is a great guy and a good friend. This article highlights what Pol offers our community.

I often tell people that the best places to find good coaching information is in the work of personal finance and business leadership. Coaching is much more like running a business than most people think, and the downfall of most personal trainers is in grasping the business side. Time management might be the reason first this, so I spend a lot of my time trying to find the best resources for mastering this key. And, nothing new is under the sun in this field!

James Clear, once again, provides us some insights. I first heard this time management method from Earl Nightingale back when I had my life turnaround in the 1980s. It was sound advice, but was attacked later by “wannabees” like a famous Utahn not far from here. Let me say this, this Lee method still works. Combine it withIke’s decision matrix and you pretty much have the last 100 years of time management locked down. I used the Lee method as a football coach and finally found clarity.

Vox is quickly becoming one of my favorite places to read. I have no idea what its agenda is, but it has great articles. This one is a great example.

“Extreme in moderation.”

Lock that down and memorize it.

If you liked that Vox article, they had a nice trail to these similar articles, here andhere. Many of our readers don’t exercise for fat loss, they exercise for performance. But the points are worth knowing: exercise, diet and fat loss dance in a very odd disco. I left your name at the door.

Markus Wessel sent this in. I think we all “know this,” but it's the counter to the point that diet and calorie restriction trumps exercise. For fat loss, maybe…sure, but for lifelong fitness, keeping going seems to trump most diet plans.

My friend Walter Dorey wrote this book on the bent press in 2009: Secrets to Mastering the Bent Press. Walter notes that when he wrote this that it was stolen immediately and popped all over the web. Note his great contribution to this movement, too. Enjoy!

Breaking Muscle is an odd place. Like my father-in-law said about Scotch Whisky, “When it is good, it is really good, when it is bad, it is awful.” I was looking for some articles and materials from Pat Flynn and I found that he has a lot of great stuff at BM. (I wish my dad were still alive, he would have chuckled at “BM.”) 300 swings a day withintermittent fasting is a pretty good program.

Marc Halpern’s article on digestive health while traveling applies to one’s usual routine, too. As much as I like Marc’s work, his link to this article brought out the fourteen-year-old adolescent in me.

I was asked to write for a site and I turned them down. It wasn’t bad or good; it was just that they wanted new “cutting edge” mass-building techniques. I couldn’t do better than this and I would frankly just repeat this article every month.

Dave Witt asked me to do an interesting thing: reread my old work. So, I went to this page on throwing the discus and discovered that much of what I write about today has its roots in hours, days, months and years of laughing, training, and hanging out with other smart people at our annual discus camp in Ohio. Next year, I'll host theArt of Coaching here in an all-inclusive three-day workshop (room and board included). There is little new under the sun, but it takes a while sometimes to mine the gems buried underneath. Maybe you could make travel plans to a workshop with me next year.

Finally, this week marks the publication of Harper Lee’s new book, Go Set a Watchman. If you don't know the story, “new” isn’t exactly right, but I am hoping it is as good as To Kill a Mockingbird. For a quick taste, try this.

"I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what." ~ Atticus Finch

Let’s finish what we start this week.