#11: Basix 5 – Exercise

Use it or lose it!

Use your body or lose your health, both physical and mental. Don’t exercise to lose weight, exercise to feel great, for the endorphins (natural happy drugs) your body releases with exercise. Build 30 minutes of exercise into your daily routine to make it a habit. When building the habit make it VERY easy, then increase your outputs by 1% every day.

Transcript:

It’s a magnificent morning out here this morning, thank you for joining me.

Today I want to talk about Basix number five which is exercise.

I’m Ian Schell and I’m glad to be alive.

You might of heard the saying ‘use it or lose it’. Now when it comes to exercise this is very true. Use your body or lose your health both physical and mental.

A saying that I live by now is that food is for the body exercise for the brain. Now what this means is that to lose weight and to look after our bodies food is the way, but to look after our mind we need to exercise, we need to exercise for the endorphins for the happy drugs that body releases from exercising.

Don’t exercise to lose weight because if your diet’s shit there’s just no point, do you know how long we have to run to burn off a big mac or mars bar? It’s just ridiculous.

If you want to lose weight do that through food but exercise to feel good, to get the blood pumping, to feel alive and feel happy, it makes such a big difference.

The best way that I’ve found to get regular exercise is to build that into your daily routine. First thing in the morning whenI hop out of bed I do push-ups and sit-ups. And then after I’ve had my shower and get dressed, I go for a walk, about twenty minutes – half an hour with the dog, get out here to our walk and talk and I kill a few birds with one stone. So build exercise in to your daily routine and it makes life easy because you just do it by default. You do it without thinking. If it’s a habit it becomes easy.

Another thing I do for exercise on a regular basis as a play squash on tuesday nights. It’s also good social outlet, you know, you catch up with people that you enjoy hanging out with, with similar interests. Find a sport that you enjoy playing, play it regularly, play it weekly. And get stuck into the social aspect because that’s that’s also another big one, is is the social interaction. We need social interaction to thrive and survive.

Another one which I find very effective is ‘Body by Science’ which is a workout that I do twice a week for 12 to 15 minutes. Now what it is, it’s a very high intensity, high workload. The trick with these exercises is to find starting weight. The idea is you need to be able to push for a good 60 to 90 seconds and at the end of 90 seconds, you should not be able to push anymore. The motion is slow and controlled, but the idea is you figure out first what your maximum is that you can push and you start with about 75% of that. Now if you go less than 60 seconds the weight is too heavy, if you go more than 90 seconds it’s too light. You need to adjust your weight so that you last 60 – 90 seconds and by the end of it, you push yourself to the point of failure. Now the idea here is to use machines because once you’re at that point of failure, the machine still controls your motion. If you do this with free weights and your fail, you can do some real damage, some real injury. So it’s best in a machine and controlled environment. And yeah give it a go.

Now if you’re full of these excuses that I don’t have time in my day,  I can’t find five minutes to exercise. I think you’re kidding yourself because in every day there’s 1440 minutes. It’s not hard to find half an hour, which is 30 of those minutes, to look after yourself. As James Altucher says ‘Choose Yourself’. Look after yourself first and part of that is exercising because without exercise the mental health may fail.

Back when I was depressed, I wasn’t taking care of the basics, I wasn’t eating right, I wasn’t exercising and naturally my health failed, both physically and mentally. At the peak of my depression I was 141kg and I just felt terrible. I had no energy,  I was lathargic.  I lost the zest for life.

Now taking care of the basics and in particular exercise, now, my daily exercise, I love it,  the energy that it gives you is amazing. When you finish your exercising it’s hard to feel shit. When the blood’s pumping and you’re all revved up, it’s hard not to feel great.

So with exercise, sometimes it can be easy to procrastinate. We’re all a bit time poor or it can be painful to exercise or it can be hard work, whatever your excuses are. But if you truly commit to building this into your habits and your daily routine, it makes it a lot easier. And to start off with, just make it so simple you can’t NOT do it.  Do five minutes, something so small so insignificant that it’s it’s ridiculous not to do it. And then once you’ve built a habit, then use one percent rule, which means increase your output by once in every day, and over the course of the year the compound effect of that one percent will be massive.

Give it a go, give it a crack. Build it into your habits increase your outputs by one percent and get stuck into it.

Please like and share this video. Leave any comments suggestions or questions in the boxes below, and I’ll get back to you.

Have a great one and I’ll talk to you soon. Seeya guys.