That’s about how many hours are left over in your life if you spend 5 hours a week training.
If you do what I do, that five hours is a decently generous helping of working-out. That could cover three weight sessions and 2-3 conditioning workouts.
Figure 8 hours of sleep, if you care about your sleep (which you do if you’re north of 40), and that’s got us down to 107 hours in which you are not sleeping and not exercising.
With some figuring, that 107 hours works out to a hefty 63.6% of any given week in which you’re awake and not doing anything to burn calories, jack up metabolic activity, or build muscle.
Where is all the attention of the fitness world?
On that five hours of working out.
Maybe a nod to the 56 hours of sleep.
The rest?
I don’t even have to tell y’all.
If you can’t see it, it may as well not be real. That’s the motto of the fitness industry, or may as well be.
But the 107 hours each week that you aren’t training is a whole lot of time to demolish any productive results from your efforts.
I’ve come to see these “empty hours” in a different way.
The usual attitude is to fill the time by doing more things.
I can get behind this to a point. I think regular movement breaks and movement snacks, where you get off your chair and go outside and walk around, maybe hit some chins or handstands or whatever, is a great thing.
But I’m cautious about turning movement into middle management.
Filling your calendar with busy-work for the sole sake of staying busy is the disease of the bureaucrat’s rotten little mind.
You’ll discover many more opportunities for wins when you start looking for ways to do less.
Not less as in sitting on the couch scrolling. That’s not actually less. That’s filling your empty hours with the noise of the rotten little thoughts and images on social media.
Busy-ness by any other name is busy-ness.
Instead, start by looking to remove the activities and behaviors and thoughts that cause you the most problems.
Doing less of what hurts you is much easier to do than doing more of what helps you.
To make the most out of the 107 hours you’ve got left over each week, remove the habits that take away the most from your gains.
More effective to skip a snack or five than it is to add more training.
If you want to leverage your time for greatest effect, this is where you go first:
Remove the roadblocks, obstacles, bottlenecks, and de-railers frustrating forward movement.
Then, and only then, does it make sense to look for the small moves that directly add to your results.
If you want to go fast, it makes no sense to keep the handbrake on while red-lining the engine.
If you want help identifying and removing your own roadblocks, hit reply and let me know. I’ll see what we can do about it.
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Matt Perryman