Why Training is More Satisfying than SFIV

Last week after more than ten years of anticipation, Street Fighter 4 was released for consoles. This is a pretty big deal if you like fighting games. What's more, the people at Capcom have taken some incredible stylistic risks, and redone all the art in a rough 3D anime sort of style, and filled the whole thing with sumi-e type ink flourishes. Even if you don't give a damn about games, you should watch this just for the artistic value.

Stirs the blood eh?

I'm debating about whether to dive into SFIV. I spent most of my teen years becoming a Street Fighter player and even entered a competition once and came in third. These days with online play I can take on people from all over the world while wearing my pajamas. It's pretty tempting.

Today as I was working out I was thinking about how much more satisfying it is to play PCP than play Street Fighter. I'll never be one of those people who automatically assume that a video game is a poor use of your time. In my mind, Street Fighter is a perfectly good way to spend your time. Once you get good, it's kind of like high speed chess. You need strategy, creativity, and decisiveness to play Street Fighter, all of which can be carried into your regular life. So don't expect a "you kids need to get off the couch and get some fresh air and exercise" lecture from me.

Here's why SF doesn't satisfy like the PCP.

In Street Fighter, there's always someone better than you. Not only better, but much, much better, so much better that when you lose in 10 seconds you feel about 3 inches tall. It's not a pleasant sensation. You can put in hours and hours of playtime and still get crushed by an even more hardcore player. And with online leaderboards you can see that even though you're pretty good you only rank 19,000 in the world. 19,000! Uh... yay!?

In contrast, because it's physical, a workout routine like the PCP can only be done a certain amount of time in a day. After an intense hour of training it simply doesn't make any sense to keep going. You'll just wear your body out and have counterproductive results. On the other hand, I can put in three hours of Street Fighter and still not feel satiated.

Second, there will never be anyone "better" at training than you. You have your one body and what you do with it is up to you. Fatten it up, trim it down, add bulk or increase flexibility, it's all up to you. No one has any right to judge what you do with your only true possession, your physical presence.

And finally, the rewards of being a badass Street Fighter player are, in the big scheme of things, pretty miniscule. A very small group of people will give you some props, but the vast majority will think you're kind of a loser. And you kind of are. Because no matter how you look at it, it's only so cool to move little men around a screen and hit buttons. I wonder what percentage of top level Street Fighter players have girlfriends, or even have relationships with females at all.

But when you start to gain some control over your body, the rewards are immense. Whether it's deserved or not, people respect someone with good posture, broad shoulders, and a trim waist. Opportunities open up because without saying a word an in shape person is communicating that they have motivation, discipline, and patience. As I tell the PCPers, imagine two people with the same qualifications are interviewing for a job at your company. One of them is fit, and the other one is a pasty sunken eyed wimp(i.e. Street Fighter pro). Who are you likely to give the job to?

So, we have activity one, Street Fighter, in which you can put hour after hour of time and at best work your way up a few rungs on a ladder than no one else cares about, and STILL get your ass kicked regularly.

And activity two, a one hour a day commitment that will make you feel confident, look better, live longer and healthier, make a good impression on strangers and the opposite sex.

It's a no brainer really.

...but I still might buy Street Fighter 4.

Getting Comfortable with Your Priorities

The most profound thing I've learned on my journey towards true fitness is how to be realistic about what a body can do within a given schedule.

Being lean and strong takes a time commitment. To get in Peak Condition the way we do it requires at least an hour a day of pure exercise. That doesn't sound like much but it comes out to more than 30 hours a month. And that's not counting the time it takes to prepare your own healthy meals. It all amounts to a pretty big time-sink.

This isn't meant to discourage anyone. In fact, the way I see it, this lets a lot of people off the hook. If you are working a full time job and have an active social/family life, you will not have the time to get into totally "ripped" territory. And that's ok.

What isn't ok is people thinking that they can work a full time job, take care of all their obligations, and still squeeze in enough time to work out and look like an underwear model. This just isn't feasible. Sooner or later something will slip. You'll be too busy to prepare your meals and end up eating out too much, killing your diet. Or you'll start to gradually skip days and then weeks of workouts. I've seen it and done it many times myself. The only reward you'll get from thinking you can do it all is increased stress and guilt.

So, here's the deal. If you aren't prepared to make some time for a daily workout (and by make time I mean cut something else in your busy schedule) then you are saying that being in awesome shape isn't really that important to you. If it was then it would be easy to cut one of your other lower-priority activities, right?

This means you can relax and understand that, as your life stands, it's just not in the cards for you to have a six-pack at this time. Stay active and healthy, but relax about not having the physique of people who put the hours in for it. Your investing your time in other stuff which hopefully is giving you rewards equal to or greater than what you'd get from a "killer bod".

If you get truly sick of not being in shape it will be natural to cut one of those things that seems more important now and get to working out. And if that day never comes then why are you feeling guilty about something you don't really want to do?

Of course for this technique to work you must be pretty comfortable with yourself and not fall for your mind's many tricks that are designed to derail your fitness plans.

Among the hits list of these tricks are:

"I'll start tomorrow"

"I deserve this"

"But I can't miss _____"

"I'm getting too old to worry about looks"

"I swear this is my last _____!"

"I don't have that body-type."

Falling for these old tricks will only prolong the guilt, not alleviate it.

Often my yoga students express frustration that they aren't as flexible as they want to be. I ask them if they are practicing at home between classes and they admit "no, I'm just too busy". I sometimes tell them, "then you don't REALLY want to be more flexible, do you? Why stress about something you don't really want to do?"

To make a comparison, I have no particular interest in visiting South America. I'm sure it's a nice place and maybe one day I'll make it there, but there are other places I want to see first. So I don't stress about how I'm not going to South America this summer, right? This is the same relaxed attitude I wish people would take about the guilt that piles on from not exercising and eating well enough.

When your ready you'll do it. Once you reach that point get in touch and we'll be happy to give you the tools you need. Till then, relax! It's the stress that kills, not the fat.

Putting Frustration Into Perspective

I was listening to a zen talk from Gil Fronsdal over at Zencast a few years ago and something he said struck a chord with me. He was talking about students' occasional frustration with a "bad session" of meditation in which they were either too scattered or too drowsy to feel like much was getting done.

Of course Gil threw out the usual lines about how dealing with these things is actually the whole point of the practice, how we're not trying to get to any special mental state but just experiencing the mental state as it is, etc...

But after that he said something to this effect.

It's not that you compare this week's poor mediation to last week's strong session. You simply do the best you can for the state that you are in. So if you're really drowsy, just staying awake and trying to keep your seat through heavy lidded eyes will in a sense be a "good session". If you are agitated, not getting carried away and drowned in your excess thought will be a "good session".

Basically, you do your best every time you meditate. But we have to understand our best is a moving target, and be satisfied when it is not where it was last week or where we think it should be after "x" years of training. Holding up any one session against another is just more attachment, more investment in unhelpful mental patterns.

Of course this principle can be applied to how we move our bodies as well as our minds. I often get frustrated emails from PCPers who feel that they didn't have a good workout, that they had to skip a day because of a full schedule, that had to go out to eat because there wasn't any fresh food in the house and they were starving.

If you have a less than ideal workout, all that's important is that you did your best for what your best was that day. If you can say that with confidence then it's easy to let go of those frustrations.

This is a dangerous path however. The mind is sneaky and will often try to convince you that you are at your limit when in fact you have a lot more in you. It takes a strong will to really do your best, and it takes practice to know where that line is.

If you feel like your decision is based on a rationalization, "I really don't feel like working out, I have a lot to do, and I'll work extra hard tomorrow" then you haven't done your best.

If your decision is based on an honest assessment of your situation, "This presentation is the most important thing on my plate right now, I can jump-rope during my lunch break and eat well but that's all I can possibly do today," then you have done your best and can go to sleep satisfied that night.

It's heady and hard-work being honest with yourself, but it's one of the most essential tasks you have on this earth. Good luck!

"Eat Well, Feel Well, Roll Eyes"

I've been toying with the idea of signing off all my blog posts, lectures, and books with the phrase "eat well, move well, be well." It's a pretty compact statement of my beliefs regarding the only way to feel healthy and get the most out of your short time on the earth. It's not about fad diets and gimmicky exercise equipment, it's simple stuff like eating a ton of vegetables and working within your body's natural parameters.

I've dropped the idea of having a signing off statement like "eat well, move well, be well" because it's super cheesy and reeks of fitness guru schlock. I want you people to know I am down here in the trenches with you, I don't know anything you don't know and if it seems like I do it's only because I've made more ignorant mistakes along the way.

I'm glad I decided to kill the line because last week I walked into a Starbucks and was confronted with this framed advertisement on the wall. Sorry about the low quality, it was taken with my camera phone.

As you can see, it's a poster sized piece that features the phrase "eat well/feel well." That's all well and good, but the foodstuffs that they have chosen to represent this feel-good lifestyle are, clockwise from the left, a foamy (perhaps whipped cream?) coffee drink, a cupcake, a piece of marble poundcake, a lettuce, cheese and tomato sandwich, and a blueberry muffin.

What a pitiful example of "eating well." The cupcake, poundcake, and muffin are all essentially the same meal, enriched flour with egg, milk, and sugar in varying amounts. There is nothing nourishing about them. The sandwich appears to be rye bread which would at least be a decent source of complex carbohydrate, but the lettuce and tomato bring basically zero to the nutritional table. That leaves us with the frothy drink and the cheese, both of which are the very non-essential dairy group of foods. (But dairy is one of the four food groups you say? Not in the other half of the world where people never touch the stuff and live long and healthy lives.)

It seems that where Starbucks and I differ is the shading of the word "well." Their "well" seems to be that of momentary gratification. As in "eat well for tomorrow we die." Accordingly, their "feel well" seems to refer to the pleasure derived from the experience.

My view of the word well is "skillfully." As in "Well played old chap." In my scheme eating a big piece of poundcake would certainly be enjoyable, but wouldn't qualify as "eating well."

We seem to have a similar disconnect in the modern world. We so often confuse what tastes good, fills us up, and turns on our seratonin pleasure centers as a generally positive culinary experience. In fact, beyond the momentary pleasure on the tongue, that kind of diet will do anything but make us feel well. It will make us fat, clog our blood pipes, and give us diseases.

What I try to tell myself and anyone who will listen is that we need to recalibrate our sense of taste and what is a "good meal." A bowl of vegetables, lightly seasoned, simply will not compete in the taste arena with a Starbuck's mocha.

The truth of the matter is that the healthiest foods and meals are light, subtle dishes that accentuate the flavor of nature. Yet we have come to expect that every meal should contain something that really knocks it out of the taste stadium. Salty, cheesy, sweet, creamy, rich, savory, these should all be viewed as treats, not mandatory parts of a meal.

This Starbucks ad is just another voice in a choir of media that is based on the idea that to really eat well and feel well you must be experiencing amazing drinks and meals at every opportunity. Break out of the matrix and see that this expectation is ruining not only our palates but our health.

Steam some vegetables, eat an apple, and see what eat well feel well really means. In my world I'd say "eat skillfully, live gracefully."