Issue #34

1) Road to Pull-up: Stage 1.
2) Steal this cardio trick from me.
3) Fix your bad habits with “addiction apnea”.
4) 5 Rules that do 99% of the job.

Read time: 3.5 minutes

Hi!

Remember the poll I ran 2 weeks ago, asking what skill you’d like to learn first?

68.18% of you chose “Pull-up”.
A crushing majority you could say.

So pull-up it is, and I hope you’re ready because this is going to be a journey!

Every week I’ll share a “stage” that you need to pass before you unlock the next one.

Only you will know if you passed or not, and it might take weeks to complete each one.

So the first thing I suggest you do is save this email in a special folder, so you can easily find any stage you want whenever you need it.

One last tip: if this stage or the next one feels easy, do it anyway.
Unlocking your first pull-up often comes down to training the basics again and really mastering them.

If you need any help with your training, please let me know by replying to this email and I’ll share my answer with everyone.

Now let’s start! 💪

1. Road to Pull-up: Stage 1.

This is where it all starts.

You want to pull yourself up, great.
But can you hang for 30 seconds?

Maybe not.
That’s your first challenge then!

If you can’t hang for 30 seconds yet, this is what you have to do:
Hang for as long as you can 5 times a day, 3-4 days a week.

If the only opportunity you have is at the gym, then start your sessions with that.
Do 5 hangs and rest 2 minutes in between.

When you can do 5 sets of 30 seconds, you’ll be ready for the next stage! 💪🏼

What to do if you can already hang for 30 seconds easily?
Spice it up with scapula pulls as we’ve learnt 2 weeks ago.

No matter your level, both dead hangs and scapula pulls will do wonders for your strength, mobility, and overall well-being.

Click this link for the full YouTube video and instructions.

2. Steal this cardio trick from me.

I train cardio like I train strength and it works.

That is a few days a week, seldom 2 days in a row, with progressive overload, and I almost never go to exhaustion unless I’m testing myself.

The most important point here is I do not go all out.
Instead, I simply aim at doing better than before or spend a few minutes “in the red”.

I make sure I challenge myself, and that’s all.

This is how I have been successfully and consistently increasing my endurance for quite some time.

If you always seek a bit of challenge in cardio, you’ll naturally get progressive overload.
If you stop before pain or exhaustion, you’ll recover well.

That way, you’ll enjoy a slow, steady, and predictable progress curve, and that’ll give you better results than any hardcore cardio training will.

3. Fix your bad habits with “addiction apnea”.

Here’s how I deal with bad habits and addictions.

Instead of waiting for a special date to quit, I stop right away and do my best to hold it until that same date.

This is a major shift.

When you do this, you don’t feel like you’re enjoying your guilty pleasure for the last time and dread that deadline.

Instead, it gives you hope and something to look forward to while you’re slowly losing this habit.

Just remember the goal is to eventually quit or dramatically decrease your addiction, without having to give up that thing you like forever.

As you approach the special date, it should become easier and easier to hold it.
And you might use this chance to keep holding past the deadline and quit completely (if that bad habit is a very bad one).

So next time, don’t wait to be ready to quit. Quit and see how long you can hold it.
I call this method addiction apnea.

4. Five Rules that do 99% of the job.

I’ll give you 5 rules that do 99% of the job if your goal is to get in shape.

You already know all of them, but it’s so simple we often forget they work.

Let me remind them to you:
-      Eat balanced meals and track calories
-      Drink at least 2 liters of water
-      Get 15 minutes of sun exposure
-      Train 3-4 times a week
-      Sleep 8 hours

Everything else doesn’t contribute to the 99%.

The problem is it’s hard to create catchy content talking only about that.
So much of what you read is about complex studies and other details that have minor impact.
And it’s diverting you from what works.

Now it’s up to you to take action on the 5 rules, or keep studying the 1% as if you already had everything else together.

No shortcut is going to save you. It’s time to work on what matters.

I hope you found some useful tips and motivation in today's edition.

Please share your feedback and help me improve my content for everyone!

A great way to do this is by replying to this email with a personal question you have about fitness.

Thanks for reading and see you next week!

- Nico

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